ABSTRACT
Trade Unions are by no means alone in experiencing problems of demarcation and there is a certain embarrassment in treating comedy in a series of monographs including also The Absurd, Irony and Satire. Eugene Ionesco’s play, Les Chaises ends with a note on its music and the final curtain is accompanied in a manner which exactly reflects the ironic confusion of vision in this ‘comedy’: Musique derisoirement triomphale, de fete foraine, soulignant le jeu ironique, a la fois grotesque et dramatique, des deux acteurs. Hinchcliffe makes a later comment on certain theatrical conventions of absurdist drama which places the tone very precisely. The use of concrete objects replaces words as a means of communication leading to a new kind of drama, where neither comedy nor tragedy alone can achieve the required and bitter lucidity. The lightly-comic obscenity becomes for Jocelin, in his obsessed and enclosed circumstances, farcical horror.
