{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81492"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81492","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"The Self-Regarding Comedy of the Contemporary British Stage","abstract":"Through detailed analysis of individual plays I examine how these playwrights alter and update stock characters and boy-meets-girl plots, and how they move away from traditional exposition and neatly resolved linear plotlines. Their comedies rework the romantic hero and heroine, and other stock characters. Their works may end unhappily, or simply stop without providing the explanations and resolutions associated with the traditional comic ending. Similarly, they may use oblique, cryptic, or densely layered language rather than the straightforward language typically associated with comedy. They write comedies about such unusual subjects as the connection between gender roles and colonialism (Churchill's Cloud Nine), Chaos theory and English nineteenth-century landscape gardening (Stoppard's Arcadia) or a woman experiencing a complete mental breakdown (Ayckbourn's Woman In Mind). Though these subjects seem too cerebral or too grim to be funny, the plays in fact do produce laughter, but this laughter cannot be explained In traditional terms as either celebratory or corrective. 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