Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Shaffer

Shaffer is describing a theatrical magic trick that doubles as a worldview. In Black Comedy, the audience sits in a brightly lit theater while the characters stumble through what they believe is pitch darkness. The gag lands because it weaponizes the most basic stage “truth” - what we can see - and flips it into a lie everyone agrees to play along with. The farce isn’t just people bumping into furniture; it’s the audience watching itself watch, complicit in a prank about perception.

The “Chinese convention” Shaffer cites is less about literal ethnography than a shorthand for stylized reversal: a reminder that theater has always borrowed codes to make the invisible legible. Here, the code is brutally simple: light equals dark. That inversion lets Shaffer choreograph status, desire, and panic with unusual precision. Who holds power in a scene? Often the person who thinks they’re hidden. Who is exposed? The one convinced they’re unseen. The comedy arises from that mismatch between intention and appearance, between the private self and the public silhouette.

“Exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play” is the key. In farce, geography is destiny: timing, proximity, and mistaken identity do the plotting. Shaffer’s twist is to make location not just physical but epistemic - what each character knows, and thinks others know, becomes a kind of moving spotlight. It’s a reminder that social life works similarly: we navigate by partial information, and the room is always brighter than we’d like to believe.