SOURCE: “New Plays: Absurd Person Singular,” in Persons of the Drama: Theater Criticism and Comment, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976, pp. 245-48.

In the following excerpt, Kauffman favorably reviews Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular, pointing out that the play should be categorized as film slapstick rather than comedy or farce.

Alan Ayckbourn has been trumpeted as the Neil Simon of England. Untrue. Neil Simon is a master of middlebrow, smart-cracking social comedy, a manufacturer of character comment that probes just enough to make us laugh indulgently and like ourselves a wee bit more. To judge by Absurd Person Singular, the first Ayckbourn play produced here, he has no such interest. (He has had several other big London successes besides this one.) Singular shows him to be much more the Mack Sennett of England—fifty percent of Sennett, anyway.

Ayckbourn calls his play a comedy, but it is farce; and essentially it...