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A bedroom farce or sex farce is a type of light comedy focusing on the sexual pairings and recombinations of characters as they move through improbable plots and slamming doors. [1]
Georges Feydeau plays, presented in Paris in the 1890s, are now considered forerunners to the Theatre of the Absurd. The Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler took bedroom farce to its highest dramatic level in his La Ronde , which in ten bedroom scenes connect the highest and lowest of Vienna.
Some of the English Aldwych farces by Ben Travers which were popular in the 1920s and 1930s have aspects of "bedroom farce", e.g. A Cuckoo in the Nest or Rookery Nook. However, in each case the sharing of a bedroom or house turns out to have an innocent explanation.
In modern times, Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) presents aspects of the bedroom farce. Michael Frayn's 1977 play Donkeys' Years is a classic bedroom farce; Frayn parodied the genre in his 1982 play Noises Off via its play-within-the-play, "Nothing On." Alan Ayckbourn's play, entitled Bedroom Farce, looks at the lives of three couples seen in their own bedrooms, the stage being split into three sets for this purpose. There is much humour in the play, although few if any of the usual conventions of farce are observed.
Boeing Boeing is a classic French farce for the stage by Marc Camoletti. Utilizing most of the conventions of bedroom farce's canon, it concerns a Parisian bachelor playboy with three international air stewardess fiancées he secretly keeps in careful rotation, until their flight schedules change and he, along with his provincial friend and sassy maid, must keep them from finding out about each other. Luckily they have enough doors in the apartment to keep the girls unwittingly flitting about for two hours.
American three-camera situation comedy, an extension of proscenium stage tradition, often includes elements of farce, specifically in several episodes of Three's Company , the "Woody's Wedding" episode of Cheers , "The Ski Lodge" episode of Frasier , and the "Love Car Displacement" episode of The Big Bang Theory .
Brian Rix performed many bedroom farces at the Garrick theatre in London, many of which were broadcast by the BBC.
British dramatist Ray Cooney, whose Run For Your Wife was the longest running-comedy in West End theater history, is a modern master of this genre.
Screwball comedy is a film subgenre of the romantic comedy genre that became popular during the Great Depression, beginning in the early 1930s and thriving until the early 1950s, that satirizes the traditional love story. It has secondary characteristics similar to film noir, distinguished by a female character who dominates the relationship with the male central character, whose masculinity is challenged, and the two engage in a humorous battle of the sexes.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to theatre:
The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall", the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th century onward, the rise of illusionism in staging practices, which culminated in the realism and naturalism of the theatre of the 19th century, led to the development of the fourth wall concept.
Noises Off is a 1982 farce by the English playwright Michael Frayn.
Michael Frayn, FRSL is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy.
'Allo 'Allo! is a British sitcom television series, created by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, starring Gorden Kaye, Carmen Silvera, Guy Siner and Richard Gibson. Originally broadcast on BBC1, the series focuses on the life of a French café owner in the town of Nouvion, during the German occupation of France in the Second World War, in which he deals with problems from a dishonest German officer, local French Resistance, the handling of a stolen painting and a pair of trapped British airmen, all while concealing from his wife the affairs he is having with his waitresses.
Roger William Allam is a British actor, who has performed on stage, in film, on television and radio.
The well-made play is a dramatic genre from nineteenth-century theatre, developed by the French dramatist Eugène Scribe. It is characterised by concise plotting, compelling narrative and a largely standardised structure, with little emphasis on characterisation and intellectual ideas.
The Garrick Theatre is a West End theatre, located in Charing Cross Road, in the City of Westminster, named after the stage actor David Garrick. It opened in 1889 with The Profligate, a play by Arthur Wing Pinero, and another Pinero play, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, was an early success at the theatre. In its early years, the Garrick appears to have specialised in the performance of melodrama. The theatre later became associated with comedies, including No Sex Please, We're British, which played for four years from 1982 to 1986.
Donkeys' Years is a play by English playwright Michael Frayn that premiered at the Globe Theatre, London, in 1976.
The architectural form of theatre in Rome has been linked to later, more well-known examples from the 1st century BC to the 3rd Century AD. The theatre of ancient Rome referred to a period of time in which theatrical practice and performance took place in Rome. The tradition has been linked back even further to the 4th century BC, following the state’s transition from monarchy to republic. Theatre during this era is generally separated into genres of tragedy and comedy, which are represented by a particular style of architecture and stage play, and conveyed to an audience purely as a form of entertainment and control. When it came to the audience, Romans favored entertainment and performance over tragedy and drama, displaying a more modern form of theatre that is still used in contemporary times.
Boeing-Boeing is a farce written by the French playwright Marc Camoletti. The English-language adaptation, translated by Beverley Cross, was first staged in London at the Apollo Theatre in 1962 and transferred to the Duchess Theatre in 1965, running for seven years. In 1991, the play was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the most performed French play throughout the world.
Comedy is a genre of dramatic performance having a light or humorous tone that depicts amusing incidents and in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. For ancient Greeks and Romans, a comedy was a stage-play with a happy ending. In the Middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone. In this sense Dante used the term in the title of his poem, the Divine Comedy.
Samantha Spiro is an English actress and singer. She is best known for portraying Barbara Windsor in the stage play Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick and the television films Cor, Blimey! and Babs, DI Vivien Friend in M.I.T.: Murder Investigation Team, Melessa Tarly in the HBO series Game of Thrones and Maureen Groff in Sex Education. She has won two Laurence Olivier Awards.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres", as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
A play is a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between characters and is intended for theatrical performance rather than mere reading. The creator of a play is known as a playwright.
Alfred Néoclès Hennequin was a Belgian playwright, best known for his farces. Born in Liège, Hennequin was trained there as an engineer, and was employed by the national railway company. In his spare time he wrote plays, and in 1870 had a success in Brussels with his farce Les Trois chapeaux. He moved to Paris in 1871 and became a full-time playwright. Between 1871 and 1886 he wrote a series of comic plays, including Le Procès Veauradieux, Les Dominos roses, Bébé and La Femme à papa. Most of his plays were co-written with collaborators including Alfred Delacour and Albert Millaud and, in his last play, his son Maurice.
Getting Gertie's Garter is a play written by Wilson Collison and Avery Hopwood. Producer A. H. Woods staged it on Broadway, where it opened at the Republic Theatre on August 1, 1921. Hazel Dawn played the role of Gertie. The play was a sex farce, but unlike most productions of its type, the setting was a hayloft instead of a bedroom. It was a success at the box office, running for 15 weeks with 120 performances on Broadway, then moving to touring companies.
Bang Bang! is a comedy play by John Cleese. It is an adaptation of the French play Monsieur chasse! by Georges Feydeau
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