The Goat

Despite the outrageous content – having introduced bestiality, Albee's script runs headlong into incest – there is a comforting formality to The Goat. Beneath the All-American angst, the elegantly observed dialogue between errant husband and confused wife and witty explanations of how farmyard action can be love, Albee has used the signifiers of Greek tragedy to frame and tame a bracing examination of sexual morality.

Using Aristotle's three unities – the erroneous theory that "the best tragedy" takes place in a single time and place and follows a single plot – at least as closely as Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Albee rolls on the archetypes: a successful architect, liberal and witty, stands in for the King; the friend performs the treacherous Nurse and Messenger; the teenage son is a posturing Chorus. There is even an off-stage death, and the title recalls the origins of drama. Tragedy is the contraction of the Greek "goat-song", originally performed at a sacrifice. The final scene sees the bloodied body of a goat dragged across the stage.

This match of conservative format and contemporary content – self-help groups and psychological rationalisation, television interviews and happily homosexual teenagers – allows Albee to wrestle some serious issues without getting stuck in the shock. There's a wry detachment at the heart of his script: the married couple's exchanges are beautifully articulated, as they find themselves unable to escape their habitual banter, even as they discuss goat sex and infidelity.

Ultimately, the moral issue of bestiality is irrelevant – as a moral flaw in a good man, it could have been replaced with murder to equal dramatic if not comic effect. Albee is more interested in the way that individuals cope with the shattering of a shared mythology. The gay son and disloyal friend are sketches of stereotypes, all the better to foreground the conflict. Neither a predictable plea for tolerance nor a damning indictment of domestic delusion, The Goat humorously considers that most tragic of narratives: the intrusion of the inexplicable into the mundane.