"Comedy is an escape, not from the truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith," wrote the English playwright Christopher Fry in Time magazine in 1950. These days the moment you switch on television in Japan, you are likely to be assailed by gales of laughter as young comedians talk frantically, gesticulate wildly and rush about. There hasn't been such an explosion of comedy on Japanese stages since the 1980s. In what was then called the shogekijo (small theater) boom, the degree of laughter in the audience was a barometer of a play's quality, and young audiences flocked to see live theater.

Since then Japanese contemporary theater -- consisting of both established companies and many new ones -- has become much more diversified, with quiet dialogue drama, translations of contemporary Western drama in Japanese, cross-arts works incorporating other genres such as dance.

Tokyo audiences are currently being treated to some of the best works by two Japanese playwrights who are both reaching out through comedy not in a slapstick style, but more along the lines described by Fry: comedy as a means but not as an end in itself. The result, in both cases, elevates comedy to being essentially a human drama that truly "escapes into faith." "Hakone Gora Hotel" is a new work by 70-year-old Hisashi Inoue, one of the veterans of the Japanese drama world and currently president of Japan PEN International.