Christopher Fry as Tragicomedian

CHRISTOPHER FRY AS TRAGICOMEDIAN ALTHOUGH CHRISTOPHER FRY HAS CALLED HIS NON-RELIGIOUS PLAYS "comedies" and has repeatedly used the term in his infrequent but incisive criticism, all his plays except perhaps Curtmantle belong to the tradition of tragicomedy. It is a form which has also been called "problem play" (in Shakespeare), "dark comedy" or, by Suzanne Langer, "averted tragedy." Fry's term, of course, is "comedy of mood." If as Eric Bentley suggests, the two most successful types of tragicomedy are tragedy with a happy ending and comedy with an unhappy ending, Fry writes the former. He has explained in an important but neglected essay on "Comedy": I know that when I set about writing a comedy the idea presents itself to me first of all as tragedy. The characters press on to the theme with all their divisions and perplexities heavy about them; they are already entered for the race to doom, and good and evil are an infernal tangle skinning the fingers that try to unravel them.... Somehow the characters have to unmortify themselves: affirm life and assimilate death and persevere in joy.! As a result, Fry's comedy merges with tragedy, farce with romance. Even his flat, stock types use an extraordinarily rich, metaphorical language which is often metaphysical, as Hans Feist has recognized: In the language of this poet sensuousness and spirit seem to merge completely. Its comparisons force the most divergent things and ideas together, and as our minds can encompass these opposites we feel the basic unity of all things in spite of our scepticism.2 At the same time his realistic, often menacing plots are filled in with a plethora of non-realistic devices like involved symbolism, coups de theatre, songs, transformations, and illuminations. In Modern Tragicomedy Karl Guthke finds that the "light" of Fry's comedies is visible only because of the underlying darkness of tragedy that it is focused on, arousing as it does that strange twilight of pensive melancholy mixed with barely subdued joy that is the hallmark of Fry's art.3 1 Tulane Drama Review (Spring 1960), p. 78. 2 "Christopher Fry: Ein Metaphysischer Dramatiker," my translation, Die Neue Rundschau (July 1950), pp. 361-62. 3 (New York, 1966), p. 120. 40 1968 FRY AS TRAGICOMEDIAN 41 Despite his rejection of naturalistic theater, which tends to present life as a vision of unmitigated horror, Fry is just as aware as O'Casey, Brecht, and O'Neill are that contrariety is at the heart of the universe. But like Pirandello and Anouilh, Fry has invented a "fairy-tale" world to win our consent to his ideas, mixing in enough reality to hold our belief, with enough fantasy to counter-balance his characters' sincerity. "It is a world of its own," Fry has said in An Experience of Critics~ "but not a world all of one kind."4 And like Shaw, Fry builds up not only his plots and scenes, but his characters as contrasts and contests of attitudes towards life in which neither side is necessarily either right or wrong. In the religious plays essentially comic persons, capable of the tragic though they may be by virtue of their complexity and depth, find themselves in the world of tragedy. From Cuthman in The Boy with a Cart (1937) to the captured soldiers in A Sleep of Prisoners (1950), Fry's protagonists escape the catastrophic destruction which overtakes the old order, but at the cost of an atoning death: someone else must die. In the comedies, however, a character fit for tragedy is plunged into a comic world. Usually a guilt-ridden, homeless death-seeker pursues a quest within a society preoccupied with zoning 1aws and outworn rituals. Furtively remorseful for her wifely shortcomings, Dynamene in A Phoenix too Frequent masochistically awaits reunion with her deceased husband. In The Lady's not for Burning, Thomas Mendip tries to trick the Mayor of Cool Clary into hanging him to expiate his real guilt for imaginary crimes.· Both the Duke and Perpetua in Venus 0 bserved begin by accepting arranged marriages, yet she finally rejects the Duke to preserve the same quality which had initially awakened his passion for her: spontaneous vitality...