Ben Travers and the Aldwych Farces

Critics and writers have generally held farce in low esteem: for example, L.J. Potts describes it as "comedy with the meaning left out"; Allardyce Nicoll regards "gross and improbable characterisation" as symptomatic of it; and Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman make these astonishing assertions in their drama textbook: "the situations in farce do not mean anything: ... [F]arce is by its own nature one-dimensional. ... Any farce ... fails, by being fundamentally off-center, to challenge greatness or even seriousness." More recent studies, both of the genre itself (Jessica M. Davis's Farce) and of individual practitioners (C.W.E. Bigsby's Joe Orton5 ) have begun to redress the balance, and some writers on contemporary drama (Katharine J. Worth's Revolutions in Modern English Drama) show a lively appreciation of farce's potential. Yet critical discussion still tends to ring an apologetic note. When Jessica M. Davis takes an O.E.D. definition as her starting-point and expands it herself, she does not seem to notice that the resulting description neglects the genre's capacities for serious import, subtlety, and laughter that repays analysis.