N. F. Simpson has been hailed by some critics as the prime representative of the absurdist movement in England. Others have called him a penetrating social critic who satirizes our crazy world with his own special brand of highly intellectual and relentlessly logical humor. Still others find his work more comparable to that of Lewis Carroll or the BBC Goon Show gagsters than to anything more philosophical or serious. They suggest that he would be perfectly at home in either Carroll's looking-glass wonderland or that lunatic world of The Goon Show radio programs so popular in the 1950s. But all of the critics agree that Simpson is a gifted comic writer, an original talent, and one of the important discoveries of the English Stage Company. Simpson, along with John Osborne, Ann Jellicoe, and John Arden, was part of the vitality of those early Royal Court years, part of...