What makes Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce so utterly captivating is not any one thing but that joyous mix of quasi-mystical elements that makes soufflés rise, parties come off, and audiences leave a theater in a state of euphoria….

[Ayckbourn's people are] both silly and wise. They are neither unduly clever nor outrageously dim-witted, but of average intelligence and average stupidity in a sturdy amalgam. And they can make fools of others and themselves with equal ease, thanks to either quality. They are funny not because they are smarter or more foolish than the rest of us, but because they are exactly like us, only in a slightly tightened, sharpened version, to make a particular brand of lopsidedness reveal its bias more theatrically. Yet unlike, say, Neil Simon, Ayckbourn does not make neuroses and deficiencies appear more cutely epigrammatic, more wittily seductive, than they are. We do not have our egos stroked, only our noses rubbed in the truth—but rubbed jovially, as Eskimos allegedly rub their noses together by way of kissing.

And when Ayckbourn turns serious, he does not go preachy on us. When things in the end do not work out after all—as so often in Ayckbourn plays—Trevor and Susannah fail in a farcical way; the drama rolls in without a portentous shift of gears. So, too, when Kate reveals to Malcolm that he does not fully satisfy her in bed, this essentially sad revelation is kept well within the comic register. Ayckbourn extends the range of farce, without cheating, to cover situations that are not farcical—the fibrillations of the heart under the feverish laughter. And he keeps his characters characters, not walking stacks of interchangeable jokebooks. No one in Bedroom Farce could make someone else's quips or gaffes. (p. 88)

Whereas at your typical successful comedy I tend to laugh intermittently—and then inwardly, inaudibly—at Bedroom Farce my laughter was a veritable chain reaction, the characters and situations being so funny that I laughed even in between the jokes. (p. 89)