It is universally acknowledged in western societies today, especially among theatregoers, that popular theatre is killing off serious theatre. There is a longstanding complaint that comedy, with its direct appeal to laughter and entertainment, has commandeered the market to such an extent that people will no longer buy tickets for serious theatre and only the popular comedies will fill the theatres. The audience for serious plays is so small that producers stage them at the risk of losing money at the box office.
But how true is this? If we confine ourselves to the performance of drama on the mainstream stage we can confirm the dominance of the popular, mainly comedy and farce, and the fact that in the Caribbean only these plays attract ticket sales. Other plays – the tragic, the experimental, the artistic, the polemic, the intellectual – have diminished in their frequency on stage largely because producers face small audiences and financial loss.