SOURCE: “Plays in Performance,” in Drama, London No. 110, Autumn, 1973, pp. 17-29.

In the following excerpt, the authors discuss trends and review plays in London theater.

Time to sober up, to return to the straight, though luckily not the strait, and still less narrow, theatre. In particular to the commercial (or as it would prefer independent) theatre, which has produced a by no means contemptible clutch of comedies. Unquestionably first among them is Alan Ayckbourn's tongue-twistingly titled Absurd Person Singular (Criterion). Those of us who have managed ever since Relatively Speaking to enjoy Mr. Ayckbourn's plays without condescension must observe with rueful amusement his gradual promotion by the beau monde into what in fact he always was, something more than a deft contriver of after-dinner amusement; after all, How the Other Half Loves even managed (unlike Ustinov's Halfway up a Tree) to survive the inevitable transmogrification imposed by the...