The Nature of Farce

Abstract

Jonathan Culler, in Structuralist Poetics, argues that part of the basis on which we make sense of texts is ‘by the existence of the genre, which the author can write against … (and) which is the context within which his activity takes place’.¹ Genre helps to create the contract between reader or spectator and writer, the frame of acceptance which allows us to experience the work in an appropriate way. One of its functions is to establish the vraisemblable, what is permitted to happen in a work of art. For example, stereotypes, unlikely coincidences, frenetic activity are to be expected in the world of farce but are unlikely to occur in a naturalistic drama. At the same time it is important to remember, as Heather Dubrow points out, that

a writer may deliberately confound our tentative assumptions about the genre in which he is writing, or a work that is essentially in one literary form may include episodes in or allusions to many other literary forms as well.²

As to the first, Ayckbourn, in Bedroom Farce, arouses expectations in his title which are confounded in the actual events of the play, since none of the three bedrooms on stage is ever used for the activities we traditionally expect in farce.