The claustrophobic family life is presented with bleak realism and bitterly comic flourishes.

Given the choreography's bitterly comic tone, they could also be metaphorically chewing on sour grapes.

The veteran tenor Waldemar Kmentt was entrancing in the bitterly comic role of the Speaker.

In one of many bitterly comic interludes, the play's Ceausescu explains why he is mightier than God.

Nicholas Rodriguez did so in a bitterly comic manner in "Inasides Out," in which he introduced dancegoers to two troubled couples.

"Perhaps," sighs the late Mattia Pascal in bitterly comic agreement, "we are one thing during the daytime, and another after dark."

The ensuing action - which ranges from the brutal to the bitterly comic - occurs amid the rubble.

Like "Riff-Raff," a bitterly comic response to the policies of Britain's Tory governments, "Raining Stones" focuses on working-class folk who have somehow failed to benefit from trickle-down economic theories.

But there are also bitterly comic images about escapist fantasies and domestic disputes.

By human standards his staging of "Contes d'Hoffmann" ("Tales of Hoffmann"), Offenbach's remarkable exercise in the bitterly comic (or is it the farcically tragic?)