<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Fabulous fizz of a French farce from Feydeau.
Review: A few years ago, I did a course at college in Modern French Drama. It was mostly the usual doom-and-gloom stuff (Becque, Giraudoux, Sartre, Camus, Beckett), with no place for the most popular of 20th century dramatists, the farceur Feydeau. This marginalisation, presumably because Feydeau was both populist and generic, tells us a lot about elitism in academia in these post-post-modernist times. What should be made clear is that Feydeau is not only more fun than the above-mentioned, but both more theatrical and more radical. Farce is the one genuinely theatrical art form - it doesn't read very well on the page, and rarely works on screen. Whereas 'realist' drama has tried to make the mechanics of drama less transparent to foreground the content, the primary pleasure of Feydeau's theatre is these mechanics: the vertignous interplay between character and plot on the one hand, and the formal choreography on the other, with its fusillade of entrances, exits, disguises, mistaken identities, verbal wit, physical violence, revolving doors, multiple stairs etc. Feydeau's art has been compared to clockwork, but that emphasis on mechanical precision doesn't do justice to the way he makes the characters plausible and their actions motivated, so that every disaster seems like a natural development rather than an imposed contrivance. But even these levels of enjoyment would be rather superfical. Where Feydeau truly excels is as a dissector of marriage and bourgeois society (one of the great joys for me reading the play was imagining the cast of Bunuel's 'The Discreet charm of the Bourgeoisie' in the roles): the games, hypocrisies, impotence, violence, ennui. There is much fun in the play's central double role, where the confusion of the bourgeois patriarch with a drunken porter leads to many of the play's confusions, and subversively undermines the middle-class dependence on firm status and identity. What emerges most clearly is the fragility of the intricate social structure when a rogue element threatens to destroy it. In the end, that's all it is, a structure, one that offers a safety net against chaos and chance, but one that doesn't leave much room for personal freedom or happiness. Like Ionesco et al after him, Feydeau locates the decadence of this society in the breakdown of language, and much of the comedy comes not only from characters with cleft palattes and thick Spanish accents, but in the misinterpreting signs and modes of communication that are supposed to make this world ordered and coherent. Finally, a plot with a comedy Spaniard and a violent hotel manager must surely have influenced 'Fawlty Towers', one of the few non-theatrical works to replicate the technical precision and emotional undertow of Feydeau's work.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous fizz of a French farce from Feydeau.
Review: A few years ago, I did a course at college in Modern French Drama. It was mostly the usual doom-and-gloom stuff (Becque, Giraudoux, Sartre, Camus, Beckett), with no place for the most popular of 20th century dramatists, the farceur Feydeau. This marginalisation, presumably because Feydeau was both populist and generic, tells us a lot about elitism in academia in these post-post-modernist times. What should be made clear is that Feydeau is not only more fun than the above-mentioned, but both more theatrical and more radical. Farce is the one genuinely theatrical art form - it doesn't read very well on the page, and rarely works on screen. Whereas 'realist' drama has tried to make the mechanics of drama less transparent to foreground the content, the primary pleasure of Feydeau's theatre is these mechanics: the vertignous interplay between character and plot on the one hand, and the formal choreography on the other, with its fusillade of entrances, exits, disguises, mistaken identities, verbal wit, physical violence, revolving doors, multiple stairs etc. Feydeau's art has been compared to clockwork, but that emphasis on mechanical precision doesn't do justice to the way he makes the characters plausible and their actions motivated, so that every disaster seems like a natural development rather than an imposed contrivance. But even these levels of enjoyment would be rather superfical. Where Feydeau truly excels is as a dissector of marriage and bourgeois society (one of the great joys for me reading the play was imagining the cast of Bunuel's 'The Discreet charm of the Bourgeoisie' in the roles): the games, hypocrisies, impotence, violence, ennui. There is much fun in the play's central double role, where the confusion of the bourgeois patriarch with a drunken porter leads to many of the play's confusions, and subversively undermines the middle-class dependence on firm status and identity. What emerges most clearly is the fragility of the intricate social structure when a rogue element threatens to destroy it. In the end, that's all it is, a structure, one that offers a safety net against chaos and chance, but one that doesn't leave much room for personal freedom or happiness. Like Ionesco et al after him, Feydeau locates the decadence of this society in the breakdown of language, and much of the comedy comes not only from characters with cleft palattes and thick Spanish accents, but in the misinterpreting signs and modes of communication that are supposed to make this world ordered and coherent. Finally, a plot with a comedy Spaniard and a violent hotel manager must surely have influenced 'Fawlty Towers', one of the few non-theatrical works to replicate the technical precision and emotional undertow of Feydeau's work.
Rating:
Summary: Best Play/Book Ever!
Review: I reccomend this book to EVERYONE! It is the best play I have ever read. I enjoyed it so much that I directed the play myself! Buy it today! -Davé!
<< 1 >>
| 
