The Balance of Comedy and Tragedy

In The Beggar's Opera, John Gay shows ordinary people aping the behavior of their betters. Gay's attitude is one of cynical condemnation, but Ayckbourn, writing more than two hundred years later, extends and refines his insight for a new age. It is Ayckbourn's remarkable insight that while ordinary people can fall prey to the same failings as their betters, those same lives are also filled with moments of extraordinary pathos and humor. Breadth and depth of emotion are not confined to the traditional figures of "great theater," such as kings and princes, but are rather characteristic of the human condition. Although neither Guy, Fay, nor Dafydd are "great," Ayckbourn depicts their comic and at times sad struggles with the universal experience of romantic love sympathetically. Although the audience might condemn Hannah's adultery, Guy's duplicity, and Dafydd's insensitivity toward his wife, they are also...