ABSTRACT
It was Peter Hall on reading A Small Family Business (staged 1987) who first drew parallels between Jonsonian comedy and Ayckbourn’s work. But Hall, as a politically and socially aware director of the National Theatre, would seem to mean more by his remark than a spotting of such superficial resemblances. ‘Cruel’ is not a word that any twentieth-century theatre practitioner will use lightly, and assuredly not Hall, who as Director of the RSC had with Peter Brook in 1964 presided over a Season of Cruelty at the Aldwych Theatre, which actively engaged with Artaud’s manifesto about the ideal nature of theatre. Ayckbourn frequently establishes his thematic purpose in a play by presenting the generic features of farce in ways that run completely counter to audiences’ conventional expectations of the form, which is a mode of intertextual referencing that relies for its effect on cultural conditioning.
