Comparing Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn, I hope I have shown how their family comedies are commonly strained through cliches and stereotypes, despite Ayckbourn's fluency in the physical language of the stage. From this comedic couple, I turn to an Anglo–American pair with a tragic bent. Edward Bond and Sam Shepard have experienced only partial success in their own countries – and never on the Broadway and West End that have cuddled Simon and Ayckbourn. Bond accrues more royalties abroad than home in Britain, while Shepard is acclaimed as an American film star rather than a dramatist. Ranging over a variety of styles – and not merely devices – Bond and Shepard do not readily lend themselves to juxtaposition. Shepard is hailed (or condemned) as quintessentially American more often than Bond is cited as typically British. I would argue that both are rooted in their native soil, Bond in Britain's social history and Shepard in American myth, but these roots are too various for comparison. Where the two dramatists are comparable is in their predilection for artist characters who comment obliquely – and theatrically – on the art of their creators.

Born a decade apart, Edward Bond (1934) and Sam Shepard (1943) are autodidacts of broad range and culture. Both men began playwriting in climates of theatre experiment of the 1960s, and both, having produced a sizable body of literature, continue to write into the 1990s. Edward Bond preaches a Rational Theatre, and Sam Shepard claims to explore an inner landscape. Bond is the most unremittingly socialist of British political playwrights, whereas Shepard's recent plays center on that archetypal American subject of the nuclear family.