SOURCE: “New Forms of Comedy: Ayckbourn and Stoppard,” in New British Drama in Performance on the London Stage: 1970 to 1985, Colin Smythe, 1987, pp. 56-100.

In the following excerpt, Cave examines how Ayckbourn's focus on character development has blurred the dividing lines between the different styles of comedy.

If Nichol's and Frayn's experiments with the form of domestic comedy and farce seem intent on defining the nature and function of these two styles, Alan Ayckbourn's prolific output seems designed to question whether what till now were believed to be necessary limitations in these styles of comedy, the “carefully engineered partial” views of events referred to above, are really necessary at all. By imposing a series of quite arbitrary limitations on himself (usually the consequences of writing primarily for the small-scale Library Theatre in Scarborough), Ayckbourn has steadily transformed the subject matter of comedy and farce making them a vehicle for...