Five Comedies

Abstract

Two people are close; they try to pass the time, get bored, quarrel, crack jokes; they encounter two other people and don’t make much of them; nothing really happens; at the end of the play they are in the same state as they were at the beginning. If this sounds like Waiting for Godot this is not wholly coincidental. For all his dislike of the style and form employed by the Theatre of the Absurd, Coward dramatised in the story of Elyot and Amanda the sense of inhabiting a universe without meaning or controlling force; in the twenties, anticipating Beckett, he earned a label for himself in Robert Graves’s summary of that decade: ‘Coward was the dramatist of disillusion, as Eliot was its tragic poet, Aldous Huxley its novelist, and James Joyce its prose epic-writer.’²

I am no good at love

My heart should be wise and free

I kill the unfortunate golden goose

Whoever it may be

With over-articulate tenderness

And too much intensity.¹