An extended footnote on comedy:

Although it’s tragedy that has been considered a dead form (see, for example, George Steiner’s influential The Death of Tragedy), few would say the same for comedy; comedy, it appears, requires no defense. In a mad world, the stage that reflects this madness while providing amusement and laughter is the stage that remains popular. If previous conceptions of tragedy led to a catharsis of pity and fear, those of comedy led to reconciliation with the world; it’s no surprise that those who find reconciliation with the world, with the culture, impossible, an unbearable compromise with the spirit, would turn to the tragic instead.

I have not intended, in any of the writing here, to argue that comedy is either an invalid or an unwelcome form of theatrical investigation, but as tragedy’s catharsis may belong to an earlier and currently untenable definition of the form, so does reconciliation to comedy’s definition. And like tragedy which has devolved to melodrama, comedy has devolved to farce and domestic amusement. A case in point is farceur Joe Orton, whose plays, for all their reputedly subversive content, end in reconciliations with domesticity. Perhaps Orton meant these reconciliations to be ironic, somehow, a bow to the form rather than an expression of his own perspective, but here we head into the choppy waters of trying to determine an author’s intent, and this is only one interpretive strategy that must be aligned with others. Orton’s plays are also distinctly of their time: all based in contemporary settings and consciousness which, in the mid-1960s, were those of Mod London. It is hard to read or watch these plays now without a constant feeling that they are somehow dated; Orton’s language, a sort of 20th century Wildean aphoristic discourse, has, it must be confessed, not held up well; at its best it’s very good indeed, but at its worst it’s embarrassingly twee. As are his plots and characters; sexuality here is all titillation, and while this may appeal  to many people, it is ultimately a closed and superficial sexuality. It’s no surprise to find that among Orton’s last projects was a screenplay for the Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles: tuneful and engaging, those mop-top Liverpool boys (and of mild sensuality at best — this is rebellion your grandmother can love), but this is pop music, not Exile on Main Street-style rock-and-roll, which maintains the sensual threat to the culture. (Sgt. Pepper was recorded in the comfortable London EMI studios, Exile on Main Street in a disused basement of a French farmhouse, one very much embedded in the culture, one very much outside of it.)

There are comedies that deny this reconciliation, that serve the same oppositional stance to the existing power structure and community and explore the possibilities of the body, as does tragedy. Jonathan Swift, Karl Kraus and Peter Barnes, like the new tragedians, deny closure and reconciliation: one is left staring into a darkness as profound as that of the tragic consciousness, and like the best tragedy deny both hope and hopelessness. Barnes’ plays The Ruling Class and Red Noses, among his many others, bring the curtain down not on reconciliation or laughter, but, especially in The Ruling Class, a shocking, violent condemnation of class and power structures, sexuality used by the class system as a bloody imposition of neopuritanical power, and there is always the suggestion that the spectator is implicated in its criminality rather than a mere bemused witness to it. (Barnes’ dialogue, while as aphoristic as Orton’s, bears a deeper sense of linguistic history, which makes his jokes all the better.)

And, as could be expected, it’s Orton’s plays that continued to be admired and revived: a continuing flight from the abyss into the sunlit gardens of the smugly amused.