Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Péter Egri: From the British Grotesque To the American Absurd: the Dramatist's Dilemma

COOPER ALBEE 15. The contrast between expected The substituion of artificial for real and actual standards leads to grot- values results in absurdity, esque incongruity. 16. Cooper's sense of incongruity is summarized in his ending the play in ironic acquiescence (after what he later considered was a false attempt at revolt)

. Albee's absurd vision made him contrive a double conclusion, one of realistic resignation and one of absurd rebellion. Cooper's more traditional approach is thus both understood and undercut, adopted and relativized, continued and revalued, appreciated and Americanized in Albee's pattern of cross-breeding acute social criticism with an awareness of absurdity. What is true of the work {Everything in the Garden

) also holds good for the life-work: Cooper and Albee developed in opposite directions. Relying on his life-experience gained during the Second World War when he served in Burma as an infantry officer, and depending on his professional experience obtained as actor and as author of radio and television scripts, adaptations and full-length plays for the theatre, Giles Cooper developed an ever keener eye for external facts and underlying truths. He had an increasingly firm grasp on theme, character and plot. As John Russel Taylor puts it in Anger and After,

; From Never Get Out! (1950), an elusive duologue between an army deserter and a disconsolate woman with a death wish set in a house supposedly about to be bombed, Cooper has specialized in the exploration of strange emotional states in the margin of human experience, sometimes with strongly macabre overtones and generally on the surface at least in terms of comedy. A whole series of progressively more experimental plays culminated in Mathry Beacon (1956), a composite picture of the lives of a group of soldiers looking 44