Ayckbourn, Alan - Elmer M. Blistein (essay date 1983)

Elmer M. Blistein (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: “Alan Ayckbourn: Few Jokes, Much Comedy,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, March, 1983, pp. 26-36.

[In the following excerpt, Blistein praises Ayckbourn's comedies, focusing on his use of setting and time.]

As The Comedy of Errors unties all its knots, as it finally reaches a moment of repose after a hectic and bewildering sequence of events, only two members of the dramatis personae are left on stage. They are identical twins, and they have just been reunited after thirty-three or twenty-five or twenty-three years. (Shakespeare is very precise about hours in this play, but he is cavalier in his treatment of years.) These identical twins, servants, have been crucial to the action, and they are the last to leave the stage. Twelve lines before Exeunt, Dromio of Syracuse says to his twin brother from Ephesus,

There is a fat friend at your master's house,
That...

[The entire page is 5174 words long]

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