Quick questions on Comedy of manners and Australian comedy: HSC Drama elective

The Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 reopened the theatres (closed since 1642 under Puritan rule) and produced a burst of comic drama. The major figures:

Comedy of manners persists in the eighteenth century but softens. Sentimental comedy displaces the harder Restoration form by mid-century. The major figures:

Comedy of manners persists in various forms across the twentieth century. The Tom Stoppard plays (Arcadia, 1993, in part), the work of Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular, 1973), the Yasmina Reza plays (Art, 1994; God of Carnage, 2006) extend the form. The boundary between comedy of manners and contemporary domestic comedy is porous.

Australian comedy is a related but distinct elective. It includes the vernacular comic tradition that runs from the late nineteenth century music hall through the New Wave to contemporary work.

The Man of Mode (1676), a satire of London Restoration manners with the fop Sir Fopling Flutter and the rake Dorimant. Etherege defined the comic register that the others followed.

The Country Wife (1675). The most sexually direct of the Restoration comedies. Horner, a rake, pretends to be impotent to seduce married women without their husbands' suspicion.

The Way of the World (1700). The most formally elegant of the Restoration comedies. Mirabell and Millamant's "proviso scene" (Act IV) is the canonical conversation about the terms of marriage.

The first professional female English playwright. The Rover (1677) and other plays bring a female perspective to Restoration comedy.

Dad and Dave stories adapted as stage and radio comedy.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) is not a pure comedy but has comic conventions.

David Williamson, Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo and others built a vernacular comic theatre. Hibberd's Dimboola (1969) is a participatory wedding-reception comedy. Williamson's Don's Party (1971) is a comic political play.

The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (1976). A camp comic monologue.

Speaking in Tongues (1996), Things I Know to Be True (2016). Bovell's plays use comic register inside larger structures.

Black is the New White (2017). The most Wildean of the contemporary Australian comic playwrights. A wealthy Aboriginal Australian family at Christmas, an interracial relationship, sustained witty dialogue.

Continue the comic-domestic tradition.