The novelist Joseph O’Connor tries to convince that this modern Playboy should speak seriously to our now “downturning society”. Thankfully, this sobriety is only half true, because humour is really only incidentally ethical, usually more concerned with laughs than values. (After all, how earnest can talk of “the aul’ AIDS” finally be?) But less understandable than a critic trying to show how serious a comedy is, is a comedy that wants to show how serious it is to begin with. It is a good thing, then, that both Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle, the play’s adaptors, have managed to keep this comedy comic, or one might say, irresponsible.
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