"[1] Set in 1912 "or thereabouts", the play concerns a family conference convened by the ageing General Léon Saint-Pé to discuss a romance entered into by his hunchbacked sister Ardèle.
Ardèle was first presented in Paris at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées on 4 November 1948; directed by Roland Piétri and designed by Jean-Denis Malclès, it starred Marcel Pérès as the General, Mary Morgan as the Countess and Jacques Castelot as the Count.
"[7] The cast on this occasion included Robert Webber (not the American actor of the same name) as the General, Hazel Hughes as the Countess, Eric Porter as the Count, Paul Daneman as Nicolas, and Lucienne Hill herself as Amélie (Anglicised as Emily).
[8] Hailed in the News Chronicle as "this brilliant and terrifying play,"[9] it reached the West End on 30 August 1951 in a production at the Vaudeville Theatre directed by Anthony Pelissier.
"[12] In his 1953 book The French Theatre of To-day, Harold Hobson noted that "Such speeches as the mad old Générale's in the last act of Ardèle, in which her crazed and morbidly acute ears hear everywhere around her the sound of animals and people and even flowers coupling, are apt to make English audiences uncomfortable."
"I remember," he added, "the horror that John Gielgud expressed to me over the scene in which the apparently pure young Nathalie confessed to Nicolas her powerlessness to resist the impulses of the flesh; and over many a luncheon Henry Sherek has described as revolting the ending of the play, where two children are made to ape the sexual desires of their parents.
It starred Charles Gray as the General, Vincent Price and Coral Browne as the Count and Countess, and Allan Cuthbertson as Villardieu; the cast also included Lalla Ward and Anita Dobson, as Nathalie and Ada respectively.