Three Boulevard Farces

by Georges Feydeau, John Mortimer (Translator)

English, French (translation)

282 pages, Paperback

First published November 6, 1985

About the author

Fils d'un romancier, il est le maître du Baudeville.Il porte ce genre mineur à la perfection avec une grande maîtrise technique .

Reviews

[John Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three plays by a master of the form. They expand on the traditional location used by Molière in The School for Wives, the household, by beginning and ending in a domestic setting but moving elsewhere for the middle act. In two of these plays, it's a hotel—which we still, more than 100 years later, are apt to rely on—where the would-be lovers (i.e., adulterers) hope for isolation and instead encounter just about everyone they don't want to see or be seen by. For the final play, The Lady from Maxim's, we move for Act II to the cleverly ironic scene of a planned wedding, where not only the values of marriage but also the wedding itself are subverted.

Feydeau, to judge from what I've read of him, was endlessly inventive: in choosing his characters, in finding a few gimmicks and devices with which to decorate the plot (the hotel in A Flea in Her Ear features a bed that rotates into a wall and brings forth a replacement), and most of all in elaborating the comedy of human desire gone awry. His people bounce about like pinballs, in never-repeating patterns.

As might be guessed from these comments, my interest in farces such as these is partly technical. I'm looking for lessons, ideas to adapt or steal. What I've chiefly learned from Feydeau so far is that the great writers are practically inimitable.