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This is what I get for being civilized
Despite my best intentions of routine insomnia, I was awake too late because I fell into a 1990 BBC Radio 3 production of Michael Frayn's Benefactors (1984) which I had never read and barely heard of and if I had a nickel for every play by Michael Frayn which dips in and out of the fourth wall of the timestream as its characters post-mortem how it all went wrong in those complicated spaces between them so many years ago, I still wouldn't be able to afford a cup of coffee at these prices even if I could drink it, but since I've seen two productions of Copenhagen (1998) and heard a third, I still think it's funny. Benefactors is harder-edged as its Brutalist architecture, more pitilessly patterned, the structure of a double-couple farce where the doors all slam with a bleak wince: still a memory play of ideas without answers, still the lacuna of human actions radiating at its heart. "But then you look up on a clear night and you'll see there's only a dusting of light in all creation. It's a dark universe." If I have to be thankful for something at this miserable moment of history, the accessibility of art is a strong contender. Also cats.
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Oh, yeah! I wouldn't have stayed awake for all of it otherwise. The structure delighted me so much that a lot of the bleakness had more intellectual than emotional effect on me, although it's not just patterning: it has real people, all of whom are complicated or none of the situation would have worked out the way it did. I loved it.
[edit] The plot is the entanglement of two married couples with urban renewal of the late 1960's and from the start of the play we know both that the housing scheme in some fashion failed and took everyone's relationships with it; the rest of the action is finding out the particulars and the emotional effect is what all comes of it. Much of it is line-by-line very funny. I don't even think its point is to depress an audience as opposed to make them think. I just found it very striking how it uses all these comic techniques and really isn't a comedy. All of the laughs have edges on them. I like that sort of thing.