Theatre: Whoops, professor, there go my trousers Alan Bennett's play Kafka's Dick is a `philosophical farce'. But isn't that a contradiction in terms?

From: The Independent (London, England) | Date: November 11, 1998| Author: | Copyright information

The wittiest definition of a philosophical farce was provided by James Fenton back in the days when he was theatre critic of the Sunday Times. Reviewing Michael Frayn's Balmoral, he contended that, in this kind of drama, "the trousers of an Idea are discovered around its ankles, a Notion is interrupted in bed with a Postulate, or a Proposition sets its foot on a banana skin. To adapt the standard definition: ordinary men are discovered in extraordinary situations because of extraordinary reasoning."

Notions with their knickers in a twist, the sine qua non for this form of farce, are in ...

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