Comedy and Tragedy in Christopher Fry

CO:MEDY AND TRAGEDY IN CHRISTOPHER FRY BROADWAY CRITICS SOME TL"dE AGO declared themselves puzzled or uncertain as to Christopher Fry's sale tragedy The Firstborn. It had not left them with that rosy glow which most of this playwright's work diffuses . When, in the autumn of 1950, his comedy The Lady's not for Burning was performed, New York showed itself quick on the up-take. Whereas, stated Time, The Cocktail Party had "sentthe audience stumping out of the theatre on its knees, pricing bad bargains out of the comer of its eye, Fry's audience pranced out into the welcoming night their eyes peeled for a pretty girl to hug or a fellow being.to clap on the shoulder." Certainly The Firstborn is not in this pattern. It hasn't the bouquet and Happy Birthday touch. It is more like an Elizabethan Tchehov-a blank-verse Cherry Orchard with the death-beetIe ticking. The obvious remark at this point is tllat the plays are in different gen1'es; The Lady's not for Burning being written on comedic, The Firstborn on tragedic lines. But in fact Fry has so horsed around with tragic and comic ingredients that this elementary distinction doesn't hold. All of his comedies skim close to death. In A Phoenix too Frequent the young Roman corporal is nearly court-martialled for a capital offense, and there is some gruesome play with corpses as well as a necrophilic desire for immolation on the lady's part. In Venus Observed the Duke's observatory is set on fire by a jealous ex-mistress and the Duke and Perpetua are almost burned alive. In The Lady's not for Burning the heroine escapes over-night from the faggots and the stake in company with a war-sickened captain who so despaired of life that he desired to be hung. Fry's last comedy The Dark is Light Enough sails even nearer the coast of shadows and at two places touches shore. The Countess Rosmarin dies on the stage, her quietist task of restoring confidence to neurotic RIchard Gettner accomplished. He, in his turn, gives himself up to the army from which he has deserted, perhaps to receive a penalty of death. Hair~breadth escapes from the direst fate are, of course, the comic dramatist's stock-in-trade; but with Fry this rescue-in-the-nick-of-time is not, we see, invariably fo~1:hcoming. The wings of the angel of death are heard, and the pihions in this play do not pass over. To affix labels and term Fry's dramas "tragi~comedies" like Beaumont and Fletcher's, or to use Byron's epithet "serio-comedy" does not get us very far. Of these two, the last is the best. It does at least suggest an underlying meaning, an end far removed from the purpose of farce. "Progress," 3 4 May writes the playwright in a note of dedication to his festival drama A Sleep of Prisoners, "is the growth of vision: the increased perception of what makes for life and what makes for death," and he goes on to state how he has sought "to find a way for comedy to say something of this, since comedy is an essential part of men's understanding." Here Fry makes his position quite clear. \Ve assume from the run of humorous plays that comedy as a dramatic form concerns itself with society's conventions , and-for all its ironies-finally respects the "appearance" of things. We think perhaps of r-.loliere-that mocker of hypocrisy from the standpoint of bourgeois virtue. We understand it as the art par excellence, pour amuser les honl1etes hommes. But Pascal knew that the poet is not to be classed as an 71011nete homme; and Fry's comic vision is essentially poetic: an exploration, not a static assessment. Fry himself has resorted to this word to describe the human task when confronted by mass danger. Thank God our time.is now when wrong Comes up to face us everywhere, Never to leave us till we take The longest stride of soul men ever took. Affairs are now soul size...