The theme in King Lear of blindness and healing through a journey of division, pain and death, is also the theme of The Stranger on the Shore, the playlet performed by Tom and Coral on amateur night. It functions as a tragic interlude, a play-within-the-play which deals with love, sacrifice and death. In showing Coral how to walk again, it tells all the characters how to find their way home after their time away from themselves and each other. It also tells Tom’s parents not to grieve; they must suffer the loss of their son, but they have shown him ‘how to walk’ while he lived. The scene ends in an image of cleansing and purification: the red glow of a bonfire on the beach.

Tom’s playlet gives perspective to Harry’s speech in Act IV i in which the father tries to see his son’s inevitable death in the light of a much larger scheme. He points to the Chinese belief that to grieve too much when someone dies means that their life was unfinished and that they had not achieved enough to be worthy of death. Harry’s tribute to his son is to accept death: ‘in a funny way we’re happy. Even while we’re very, very sad.’

These lines also sum up the tone of the play as well as the feeling the audience retains at the sum up the tone of the play as well as the feeling the audience retains at the end; a feeling of simultaneous elation and sorrow. The characters’ self-deception is portrayed through comedy, but the humour is counterpointed both by a dark tone of longing and bitterness, of unattainable dreams and lost ambition, by a lyrical tone of magic and beauty, which in this play expresses the poetry of life. Throughout the play, comic and serious scenes are juxtaposed, and each scene contains a mixture of light and dark tones. Gow infuses the serious themes with a comic vision; he finds both the ridiculous and the tragic in ordinary people and everyday events. The character of Gwen is genuinely funny as the stereotypical nagging wife and mother, the pretentious snob whose aspiration are symbolised by a caravan with all the comforts of her suburban home. But her actions and language are like an armour hiding pain and fear as tangible as Tom’s illness.