Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings in the Comic Tradition

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 1 University of Marburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik) course: SE: British Drama from the 1950s to the Present language: English abstract: This term paper deals with the placement of Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings in the English comic tradition. Therefore I will first put Ayckbourn's play within the historical context of the new drama and subsequently define the term comedy. Then I will prove my thesis that Season's Greetings matches both conventionality and innovation with regard to comedy. In this way I will also investigate in how far Season's Greetings as comedy contains both farcical and tragic elements and suits other subgenres of comedy too. Likewise I will analyse how Ayckbourn makes use of the comic in Season's Greetings and discuss if he continues the comic tradition with a new emphasis with regard to the assumption that he like Shakespeare writes plays for the spectator rather than the reader among other things. In the conclusion I will recap and reconsider the principal theses of my term paper and give my own diagnosis about Ayckbourn's drama. My thesis matters in so far that the continuing life that [...] comedies have [...] justifies our study of the genre [...]. Besides English comedy has the longest most continuous generic tradition in Western literature in which its tendency to the meta-theatrical achieves an awareness of the comic tradition onstage (cf. Leggatt 2). Anyway it is meaningful that serious issues of everyday life are treated in a comic way.