When The Skin of Our Teeth first appeared in 1942, Wilder deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for a play that stepped into what is pretentiously called the 'epistemological dimension', that area where are made to challenge our own unspoken assumptions and conventions for viewing and interpreting theatre. Did we believe, he asked, that what happens onstage must duplicate the everyday tangible world, that the proscenium arch is a keyhole through which we peep and overhear real people? Simultaneous to these queries Wilder offered in the comic allegory of one American family the past history, present peril and future redemption of human civilisation from ignorance, hedonism and holocaust. A tall order for comedy, especially when Wilder foresaw not merely the eventual devastation in Europe and Asia, but recalled in the Nazi pogroms and the burning of 'decadent' literature a threat to all learning, particularly to metaphysics and the arts.

But...