Alan Ayckbourn's 'Season's Greetings' in the Comic Tradition : An Investigation of Ayckbourn's Use of the Comic in the Historical Context of the New Drama

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Marburg (Institut fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: SE: "British Drama from the 1950s to the Present", 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This term paper deals with the placement of Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings in the English comic tradition. Therefore, I will first put Ayckbourn's play within the historical context of the new drama, and subsequently define the term "comedy". Then, I will prove my thesis that Season's Greetings matches both conventionality and innovation with regard to comedy. In this way, I will also investigate in how far Season's Greetings as comedy contains both farcical and tragic elements, and suits other subgenres of comedy, too. Likewise, I will analyse how Ayckbourn makes use of the comic in Season's Greetings, and discuss if he continues the comic tradition with a new emphasis with regard to the assumption that he, like Shakespeare, writes plays for the spectator rather than the reader, among other things. In the conclusion, I will recap and reconsider the principal theses of my term paper and give my own diagnosis about Ayckbourn's drama. My thesis matters in so far that "the continuing life that [...] comedies have [...] justifies our study of the genre [...]". Besides, English comedy has "the longest, most continuous generic tradition in Western literature", in which its tendency to the meta-theatrical achieves an awareness of the comic tradition onstage (cf. Leggatt 2). Anyway, it is meaningful that serious issues of everyday life are treated in a comic way.