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Four Farces
Wild plots and quicksilver wit characterize the plays of Georges Feydeau. Called the greatest master of French comedy since Molière by admirers such as Kenneth Tynan, Feydeau reflects the lusty tradition of the French bedroom farce as well as the tough exorbitant humor later to find full expression in the theater of the absurd.
402 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1972
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About the author
Georges Feydeau
259 books15 followersFils d'un romancier, il est le maître du Baudeville.Il porte ce genre mineur à la perfection avec une grande maîtrise technique .
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 30, 2022
In attempting to review Four Farces (Tour De Farce, Vol 5) by George Feydeau, translated by Norman Shapiro; one may want to consider a few things. I was educated into the literary cannon that tended to neglect comedy. An English-speaking person who has not been exposed to any of several of Shakespeare’s tragedies is unusual. More unusual is one who has had to study more than one of his comedies. Likewise, very few comedies grace the pages of our high school must read list.
Perhaps parents are suspicious of home work that involves laughter, but it has contributed to a common prejudice that comedy is easy. At some point most of us realize that it is not. The other thing I have learned is that reading comedic plays present challenges. Stage directions can break the mood. Much depends on the readers ability to imagine how much the performer’s face, timing, gestures and delivery contribute to the effect. In the case of plays written in a foreign language and centered in times and sensibilities past, there is agreement that these can have deleterious effects on a reader’s enjoyment.
To all of the general warnings and admission to what may be my personal limitations, my bottom line is that these plays read as amusing, but need the liveliness of performance to be experienced. For example, Faydeau fills his scripts with detailed stage direction. Translator Shapiro makes it clear that these are likely to become critical to the sight gags designed into the performance. In reading they can break the flow of the comedy and be hard to connect to the latter moment when the stage layout becomes part of the jokes. My suggestion is that this book may be best used by allowing a theater goer to read it first, and trading the possible anticipated dialogue, for the ability to perhaps miss a spoken line while being tickled by the physical aspects of the show.
I would also suggest that a reader take some time to learn about the social milieu that were the spirit of the times when Faydeau was writing. Paris at the end of the 19th century was not just end of the century. It was and can only be fin de siècl. Grand social excess was judged only by scale and how well executed. Wealth was openly squandered on publicly flouted mistresses. Indeed, there was a special time each day set aside for the conduct of affairs. (5 to 7PM) Home theaters were not just a space with a large TV, but an oversized areas suitable for concerts and fully staged live performance. For those with it, money was spent lavishly, in cash in 22 K gold coins, (Louis d'or). OF course carrying lavish debt could also be a sign of class.
For those with the money near daily attendance at the theater was the norm, even if attendees were more engaged in private matters and the entertainment of seeing and being seen.
It was in this social world that Feydeau became one of the most popular authors of what was called burlesque. We tend to think of burlesque as naughty, teasing strip shows with comedians and jugglers providing breaks in the display of a tad more than just Victorian lady’s ankles. Parisian burlesque was a progress from very short to multi act performances of light humor. Some social satire was allowed but not much in the way of political content nor indeed much in the way of sharp irony.
Faydeau will give us some of the same traditional comedy around old men loving young women and lost at sea husbands. His women are rarely fainting lightweights. They can and do stand up to pompous men and Feydeau may have created the precocious child, wiser than his years and a major pain to all except his dotting mother.
This is not intellectual humor. It is situational not too far from many 21st century TV comedies. The comedic tension depends on Feydeau’s ability to keep in balance a structure that will inevitably careen under the continual addition of ever less likely but somehow reasonable, in the circumstances, complexities. You may absolutely know where any given play will go, but the fun is in the trip, or trip overs that may yet trip you on the way to the final curtain.
Perhaps parents are suspicious of home work that involves laughter, but it has contributed to a common prejudice that comedy is easy. At some point most of us realize that it is not. The other thing I have learned is that reading comedic plays present challenges. Stage directions can break the mood. Much depends on the readers ability to imagine how much the performer’s face, timing, gestures and delivery contribute to the effect. In the case of plays written in a foreign language and centered in times and sensibilities past, there is agreement that these can have deleterious effects on a reader’s enjoyment.
To all of the general warnings and admission to what may be my personal limitations, my bottom line is that these plays read as amusing, but need the liveliness of performance to be experienced. For example, Faydeau fills his scripts with detailed stage direction. Translator Shapiro makes it clear that these are likely to become critical to the sight gags designed into the performance. In reading they can break the flow of the comedy and be hard to connect to the latter moment when the stage layout becomes part of the jokes. My suggestion is that this book may be best used by allowing a theater goer to read it first, and trading the possible anticipated dialogue, for the ability to perhaps miss a spoken line while being tickled by the physical aspects of the show.
I would also suggest that a reader take some time to learn about the social milieu that were the spirit of the times when Faydeau was writing. Paris at the end of the 19th century was not just end of the century. It was and can only be fin de siècl. Grand social excess was judged only by scale and how well executed. Wealth was openly squandered on publicly flouted mistresses. Indeed, there was a special time each day set aside for the conduct of affairs. (5 to 7PM) Home theaters were not just a space with a large TV, but an oversized areas suitable for concerts and fully staged live performance. For those with it, money was spent lavishly, in cash in 22 K gold coins, (Louis d'or). OF course carrying lavish debt could also be a sign of class.
For those with the money near daily attendance at the theater was the norm, even if attendees were more engaged in private matters and the entertainment of seeing and being seen.
It was in this social world that Feydeau became one of the most popular authors of what was called burlesque. We tend to think of burlesque as naughty, teasing strip shows with comedians and jugglers providing breaks in the display of a tad more than just Victorian lady’s ankles. Parisian burlesque was a progress from very short to multi act performances of light humor. Some social satire was allowed but not much in the way of political content nor indeed much in the way of sharp irony.
Faydeau will give us some of the same traditional comedy around old men loving young women and lost at sea husbands. His women are rarely fainting lightweights. They can and do stand up to pompous men and Feydeau may have created the precocious child, wiser than his years and a major pain to all except his dotting mother.
This is not intellectual humor. It is situational not too far from many 21st century TV comedies. The comedic tension depends on Feydeau’s ability to keep in balance a structure that will inevitably careen under the continual addition of ever less likely but somehow reasonable, in the circumstances, complexities. You may absolutely know where any given play will go, but the fun is in the trip, or trip overs that may yet trip you on the way to the final curtain.
July 20, 2016
I'm going to use this space primarily to survey the works contained herein and give readers a sense of what they might find here. That said, I can't fail to plug my review of Bermel's book on farce, which contains pretty much everything I have to say on the subject at this point. It's not nearly as learned as the Bermel book I'm ostensibly reviewed, but it is significantly shorter. Anyway, you should consider my other review as context, inasmuch as it contains the perspective through which I read and enjoy plays such as those contained in this volume.
Considering French farce as a whole, I confess to being a big Moliere fan. From the 19th century, my favorites remain any libretti that Jacques Offenbach has set to music. From the 20th century -- well, the recent past has (fortunately!) not winnowed down all the various farcical offerings from stage, screen, and broadcast to allow any kind of thoroughgoing sample, but --
Oh, alright, I'll confess that in addition to the other works cited above, after Jean-Paul Sartre and Irish ex-pat Samuel Beckett my taste in turns primarily (entirely?) to farces by native English speakers (I also have a preference for satire, which is not to say that I see firewalls between genres). George Abbott. Woody Allen. Charlie Chaplin. Nora Ephron. William Goldsmith. Harold Ramis. Not a complete list by any means.
(Personal note: of the plays listed below that form the basis of this collection, those not in boldface are ones I wouldn't bother revisiting on the page.)
Four by Feydeau is Norman Shapiro’s other set of Feydeau translations. It repeats the pleasing Par la fenetre (which I quoted in my review of Shapiro’s collection of Feydeau one acts), and otherwise adds:
La Mariage de Barillon (translated as “On the Marry-Go-Wrong”) - an alcoholic court record keeper mixes up divorce and marriage proceedings leading to mispaired marriages (including a bigamy), fortunately he ends up repeating the mistake in a way that repairs the damage. Includes an amusing subplot about a judge keeping an eye out for a duellist’s seconds who want to drag him off to the field of honor.
Un Fil a la patte (translated as “Not by Bed Alone”) - almost certainly reads better on the stage than on the page. Your basic sex farce in which an uxorious man desperately seeks to hide a past affair from his betrothed (at least until they can be wed). Fortunately for him, it’s actually his sordid streak that turns her on. The plot is more or less an expansion of/identical to Feydeau’s one act Les Paves de l’ours (which Shapiro has translated as “The Boor Hug”), albeit flipping the ending in this case. Your results will vary, but I preferred Les Paves, which I thought both more tightly constructed and much funnier.
Un purge Bebe (translated here as “Going to Pot”) begins with an enjoyable character-establishing rimshot. The petit bourgeois Follavoine, who has been futilely consulting a mammoth dictionary, throws a hail mary out to his ill-educated maid:
Georges Feydeau's boulevard (mostly bedroom) farce is a bit hit-and-miss for me, though I reserve the right to change my mind after I finish the last collection of his works I have yet to read. However, I think there's more than enough meat on the bones of many of the works about which I am indifferent (chiefly, Les Paves de l'ours and Un Fil a la patte) to render this critique moot. (I mean, come on, the dude was a prolific plyer of the genre over his lifetime.) Still, if you’re looking to sample a variety of French farces by different authors, I think Albert Bermel's and Eric Bentley’s respective collections the best places to begin. I enjoyed half of Bermel’s and two-thirds of Bentley’s samples. In entering this review, and my respective reviews of Bentley, Bermel, two other Feydeau anthologies, and Moliere (and probably Plautus and Terence, anthologies of whose works I am reading at the time of posting this), you can look for me to include brief synopses of (most of) the plots found within and at least one excerpt of representative dialogue.
Considering French farce as a whole, I confess to being a big Moliere fan. From the 19th century, my favorites remain any libretti that Jacques Offenbach has set to music. From the 20th century -- well, the recent past has (fortunately!) not winnowed down all the various farcical offerings from stage, screen, and broadcast to allow any kind of thoroughgoing sample, but --
Oh, alright, I'll confess that in addition to the other works cited above, after Jean-Paul Sartre and Irish ex-pat Samuel Beckett my taste in turns primarily (entirely?) to farces by native English speakers (I also have a preference for satire, which is not to say that I see firewalls between genres). George Abbott. Woody Allen. Charlie Chaplin. Nora Ephron. William Goldsmith. Harold Ramis. Not a complete list by any means.
(Personal note: of the plays listed below that form the basis of this collection, those not in boldface are ones I wouldn't bother revisiting on the page.)
Four by Feydeau is Norman Shapiro’s other set of Feydeau translations. It repeats the pleasing Par la fenetre (which I quoted in my review of Shapiro’s collection of Feydeau one acts), and otherwise adds:
La Mariage de Barillon (translated as “On the Marry-Go-Wrong”) - an alcoholic court record keeper mixes up divorce and marriage proceedings leading to mispaired marriages (including a bigamy), fortunately he ends up repeating the mistake in a way that repairs the damage. Includes an amusing subplot about a judge keeping an eye out for a duellist’s seconds who want to drag him off to the field of honor.
Un Fil a la patte (translated as “Not by Bed Alone”) - almost certainly reads better on the stage than on the page. Your basic sex farce in which an uxorious man desperately seeks to hide a past affair from his betrothed (at least until they can be wed). Fortunately for him, it’s actually his sordid streak that turns her on. The plot is more or less an expansion of/identical to Feydeau’s one act Les Paves de l’ours (which Shapiro has translated as “The Boor Hug”), albeit flipping the ending in this case. Your results will vary, but I preferred Les Paves, which I thought both more tightly constructed and much funnier.
Un purge Bebe (translated here as “Going to Pot”) begins with an enjoyable character-establishing rimshot. The petit bourgeois Follavoine, who has been futilely consulting a mammoth dictionary, throws a hail mary out to his ill-educated maid:
FOLLAVOINE: You wouldn’t know, off hand -- where the Aleutians are?Give Rose a hand, ladies and gentlemen, although it’s too bad she won’t be back later. Actually, it’s not really Rose’s character that Feydeau is establishing here, as this sequence continues unspooling:
ROSE: Monsieur?
FOLLAVOINE: The Aleutians. You wouldn’t happen to know where they are, would you?
ROSE: Oh no! No, Monsieur, I don’t put things away around here. Madame is the one who --
FOLLAVOINE, standing up straight: What? “Put things away -- !” What are you talking about? The Aleutians! The Aleutians! They’re islands, idiot! Islands. Earth surrounded by water. You know what that is?
ROSE, opening her eyes wide: Earth surrounded by water?
FOLLAVOINE: Yes. Earth surrounded by water. What do you call it?
ROSE: Mud?
FOLLAVOINE: mud? No, no -- not mud! It’s mud when there’s just a little earth and a little water. When there’s a lot of earth and a lot of water it’s called an island.
ROSE, amazed: Oh?
FOLLAVOINE: That’s what the Aleutians are. Islands. You understand? They aren’t in the apartment.
ROSE, trying her best to understand: Oh yes, Monsieur. They’re outside the apartment.
FOLLAVOINE: Of course they’re outside the apartment!
ROSE: Yes, Monsieur, I understand. But I haven’t seen them, Monsieur.
FOLLAVOINE: That’s fine! Thank you.
ROSE, trying to justify herself: I haven’t been in Paris very long…
FOLLAVOINE [after she leaves]: ...Ha! It’s incredible! That girl doesn’t know a thing. Absolutely nothing. What did she learn in school, I wonder? (He crosses to his desk, leaning against it once again to consult the dictionary.) Now let’s see, Eleutians -- Eleutians -- That’s funny. “Elephant, Eleusis, elevate--” But no Eleutians! It should be right here between “Eleusis” and “elevate.” Bah! This dictionary is worthless!That wacky, intolerant ignoramus! What’s to become of him?! Well, if I told you that Follavoine’s wife wore roughly the same disposition (she ridicules him for not looking under the letter ‘i’) and that their current squabbles all centered on getting their young brat to drink a laxative, you might see where this will lead... especially if you knew that the latest domestic kerfuffle was interrupting Follavoine’s aspirations to demonstrate his “unbreakable” ceramic chamber pots to a military supply officer competing an exclusive contract. If you guessed a duel challenge and cuckold accusation, then you are clearly familiar with the norms of Belle Epoque France. Naturally, the wrong people end up consuming the laxative, the fun is in seeing how all this comes about.
Georges Feydeau's boulevard (mostly bedroom) farce is a bit hit-and-miss for me, though I reserve the right to change my mind after I finish the last collection of his works I have yet to read. However, I think there's more than enough meat on the bones of many of the works about which I am indifferent (chiefly, Les Paves de l'ours and Un Fil a la patte) to render this critique moot. (I mean, come on, the dude was a prolific plyer of the genre over his lifetime.) Still, if you’re looking to sample a variety of French farces by different authors, I think Albert Bermel's and Eric Bentley’s respective collections the best places to begin. I enjoyed half of Bermel’s and two-thirds of Bentley’s samples. In entering this review, and my respective reviews of Bentley, Bermel, two other Feydeau anthologies, and Moliere (and probably Plautus and Terence, anthologies of whose works I am reading at the time of posting this), you can look for me to include brief synopses of (most of) the plots found within and at least one excerpt of representative dialogue.
August 14, 2017
3.5 stars
March 12, 2015
Wonderful. Would love to see one produced!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews