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Plays 2: The Girl from Maxim's / She's All Yours / A Flea in Her Ear / Jailbird
Kenneth McLeish's definitive translations of the most successful French dramatist of the Belle Epoque
Georges Feydau (1862-1921) was the most successful French dramatist of the belle epoque and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest of farce-writers. His series of dazzling hits matched high-speed action and dialogue with ingenious plotting. Reaching the heights of farcical lunacy, his plays nevertheless contain touches of barbed social comment and allowed him to mention subjects which would have provoked outrage in the hands of more serious dramatists.
This volume of new, sparkling translations by Kenneth McLeish contains two plays from the peak of his career, The Girl from Maxim 's and She's All Yours (La Main Passe), together with an early work, Jailbird (Gibier de potence).
Georges Feydau (1862-1921) was the most successful French dramatist of the belle epoque and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest of farce-writers. His series of dazzling hits matched high-speed action and dialogue with ingenious plotting. Reaching the heights of farcical lunacy, his plays nevertheless contain touches of barbed social comment and allowed him to mention subjects which would have provoked outrage in the hands of more serious dramatists.
This volume of new, sparkling translations by Kenneth McLeish contains two plays from the peak of his career, The Girl from Maxim 's and She's All Yours (La Main Passe), together with an early work, Jailbird (Gibier de potence).
528 pages, Paperback
First published February 21, 2002
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About the author
Georges Feydeau
260 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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March 16, 2014
I find this to be a perfect collection. There is not a bum steer in the book. If you want someplace to start with Feydeau, this is probably your best bet.
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. (RIP) Not a complete list by any means.
Still, if you’re looking to read a survey of works from different authors, Eric Bentley's and Albert Bermel’s respective anthology are not bad 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, three Feydeau anthologies, and Moliere (and probably Plautus and Terence, anthologies of whose works I am reading at the time of posting this), I have included brief synopses of (most of) the plots found within and at least one excerpt of representative dialogue.
Personal note that bears repeating here: If you want someplace to start with Feydeau, this collection is probably your best bet. It contains the following masterworks:
La Dame de chez Maxim (translated as "The Girl from Maxim's") - an otherwise upstanding, married doctor wakes up to discover two novel experiences: (a) a post-blackout hangover, and (b) a young woman in his bed. Complications ensue, but if it's a hindrance that his high-ranking wealthy General uncle is a take-charge kind of guy, it helps that his wife is a spiritualist simpleton who is easily duped. You do feel sorry for the girl of the play -- La Mome Crevette, translated here as "Shrimp," but probably more au courantly called Lil' Shorty -- who is sufficiently capable and emotionally stable to be able to take almost everything in stride. It's just too bad the plot forces her to.
La Main passe (translated as "She's All Yours," but frankly, why not simply translate this literally as "Passing the Hand?" Feydeau's bridge metaphor makes perfect sense in English) - a spot-on skewering on French marital mores. The husband drives his wife from one paramour to another, each affair leading to divorce and marriage, because of course while it is considered acceptable for a married man to take a mistress, a woman's fooling around outside of wedlock cannot be tolerated.
Structurally, the play is interesting as well. It's in four acts, not three, and divided evenly between flip-flopping protagonists. Specifically, the main characters of the first two acts (whose conflict is fully resolved) become the complicating characters for the second two acts' protagonists (who held the opposite roles at the start). In other words, the story unfolds multiple, serial conflicts, and shifting points of view while retaining a single thematic arc. And it all works. Masterful.
La Puce a l'oreille (reluctantly translated by McLeish literally as "A Flea in Her Ear;" he would have preferred the idiomatically-correct "A Bee in Her Bonnet," but felt that the play's title was already too well-known to modify) - this madcap sex farce is built entirely around widely-suspected imbroglio that ironically never gets to consummation. All the characters run about in a frenzy of jealous accusation that mounts until one of the characters manages a satisfactory (if not actually complete) explanation... albeit in Spanish. The second act is sheer lunacy, the classic farce relay race of characters endlessly running up and down staircases and in and out of doors in a desperate attempt to avoid one another. Three other well-served tropes that further the confusion here are: (1) the character with a speech impediment, (2) the character with a doppelganger (played by the same actor, of course), and (3) the room with a mechanical wall/bed on a swivel that allows for different characters to be accidentally rotated/swapped at the least convenient times. My only complaint here lies with McLeish's translation, in that he chose to retain the nationality of the English ruffian Rugby, which has the unintended consequence of French characters translated into English failing to communicate clearly with an English-natural speaker (who is not given a daunting accent, and of course, speaks English). I think it would have been truer to Feydeau's original to have converted Rugby into Australian, Dutch, or frankly French, but the oddity doesn't get in the way of the fun.
Gibier de potence (translated here as "Jailbird;" this can also be found in Norman Shapiro's collection of Feydeau One-Act translations, so those interested in comparing translators might find the direct contrast instructive) - here Feydeau plays with a pair of cowards each convinced that the other is a notorious murderer. He could well have developed or otherwise incorporated the situation into a fuller plot, however, it's an earlier work and just runs the one act until he apparently tires of the matter.
In all these plays, the majority of the humor is derived from the various characters' discomfiture as they try to wriggle out of their respectively unhappy circumstances. That said, there is a bit of wordplay, ranging from neologism (Rugby's 'Eniwunformy' way of asking after visitors in Puce) to malapropism and deliberate misunderstanding, to this bit of awkward repetition from La Dame de chez Maxim (p. 44) with which I will conclude this review:
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. (RIP) Not a complete list by any means.
Still, if you’re looking to read a survey of works from different authors, Eric Bentley's and Albert Bermel’s respective anthology are not bad 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, three Feydeau anthologies, and Moliere (and probably Plautus and Terence, anthologies of whose works I am reading at the time of posting this), I have included brief synopses of (most of) the plots found within and at least one excerpt of representative dialogue.
Personal note that bears repeating here: If you want someplace to start with Feydeau, this collection is probably your best bet. It contains the following masterworks:
La Dame de chez Maxim (translated as "The Girl from Maxim's") - an otherwise upstanding, married doctor wakes up to discover two novel experiences: (a) a post-blackout hangover, and (b) a young woman in his bed. Complications ensue, but if it's a hindrance that his high-ranking wealthy General uncle is a take-charge kind of guy, it helps that his wife is a spiritualist simpleton who is easily duped. You do feel sorry for the girl of the play -- La Mome Crevette, translated here as "Shrimp," but probably more au courantly called Lil' Shorty -- who is sufficiently capable and emotionally stable to be able to take almost everything in stride. It's just too bad the plot forces her to.
La Main passe (translated as "She's All Yours," but frankly, why not simply translate this literally as "Passing the Hand?" Feydeau's bridge metaphor makes perfect sense in English) - a spot-on skewering on French marital mores. The husband drives his wife from one paramour to another, each affair leading to divorce and marriage, because of course while it is considered acceptable for a married man to take a mistress, a woman's fooling around outside of wedlock cannot be tolerated.
Structurally, the play is interesting as well. It's in four acts, not three, and divided evenly between flip-flopping protagonists. Specifically, the main characters of the first two acts (whose conflict is fully resolved) become the complicating characters for the second two acts' protagonists (who held the opposite roles at the start). In other words, the story unfolds multiple, serial conflicts, and shifting points of view while retaining a single thematic arc. And it all works. Masterful.
La Puce a l'oreille (reluctantly translated by McLeish literally as "A Flea in Her Ear;" he would have preferred the idiomatically-correct "A Bee in Her Bonnet," but felt that the play's title was already too well-known to modify) - this madcap sex farce is built entirely around widely-suspected imbroglio that ironically never gets to consummation. All the characters run about in a frenzy of jealous accusation that mounts until one of the characters manages a satisfactory (if not actually complete) explanation... albeit in Spanish. The second act is sheer lunacy, the classic farce relay race of characters endlessly running up and down staircases and in and out of doors in a desperate attempt to avoid one another. Three other well-served tropes that further the confusion here are: (1) the character with a speech impediment, (2) the character with a doppelganger (played by the same actor, of course), and (3) the room with a mechanical wall/bed on a swivel that allows for different characters to be accidentally rotated/swapped at the least convenient times. My only complaint here lies with McLeish's translation, in that he chose to retain the nationality of the English ruffian Rugby, which has the unintended consequence of French characters translated into English failing to communicate clearly with an English-natural speaker (who is not given a daunting accent, and of course, speaks English). I think it would have been truer to Feydeau's original to have converted Rugby into Australian, Dutch, or frankly French, but the oddity doesn't get in the way of the fun.
Gibier de potence (translated here as "Jailbird;" this can also be found in Norman Shapiro's collection of Feydeau One-Act translations, so those interested in comparing translators might find the direct contrast instructive) - here Feydeau plays with a pair of cowards each convinced that the other is a notorious murderer. He could well have developed or otherwise incorporated the situation into a fuller plot, however, it's an earlier work and just runs the one act until he apparently tires of the matter.
In all these plays, the majority of the humor is derived from the various characters' discomfiture as they try to wriggle out of their respectively unhappy circumstances. That said, there is a bit of wordplay, ranging from neologism (Rugby's 'Eniwunformy' way of asking after visitors in Puce) to malapropism and deliberate misunderstanding, to this bit of awkward repetition from La Dame de chez Maxim (p. 44) with which I will conclude this review:
PETYPON (to the General): Uncle Charles, may I introduce my old friend and colleague, Doctor Mongicourt? [To Mongicourt] General Charles Petypon du Grele. My uncle.It's funny to me not merely for the elegance of the repeated, yet nuanced meanings of the single word, but also because I've been there. And, well, haven't we all?
MONGICOURT: Glad to meet you. After all these years.
GENERAL: Ah. Hem. Yes. Know what you mean.
MONGICOURT: Really? Oh. Splendid. Splendid.
ALL (laughing): Splendid.
GENERAL: Well, well, well.
ALL: Well, well.
MONGICOURT: Well.
PETYPON: Well.
MONGICOURT: Are you staying in Paris long?
PETYPON (alone): I say, well, well. [Seeing he is on his own.] Well?
April 12, 2012
Together with Volume 1 - a truly wonderful collection of pre-absurdist theatre.
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