FORM OR FORMULA?

García Lorca is reported by his brother as saying, ‘If in certain scenes the audience doesn't know what to do, whether to laugh or to cry, that will be a success for me.’ Such a statement by a playwright could not easily have been made in any century but our own. We know that several great plays from the past have called for an equally vacillating response from their audiences, yet not until now, confronted by a prolific line of modern plays which refuse to be pigeon-holed as comedies or tragedies, are we being forced to rethink some of the long-accepted categories which have traditionally helped us to evaluate the play.

Over recent years, comments from critics have grown increasingly ambivalent and paradoxical, and we now flounder in the near-meaningless terminology of the farcical tragedy and the pathetic comedy, the drame comique and the pseudo-drame, the ‘charade’ and the ‘extravaganza’. The term ‘tragicomedy’ was equivocal enough in the past.