Georges Feydeau

He gave up writing for a time in the early 1890s and studied the methods of earlier masters of French comedy, particularly Eugène Labiche, Alfred Hennequin and Henri Meilhac.

The plays of Feydeau are marked by closely observed characters, with whom his audiences could identify, plunged into fast-moving comic plots of mistaken identity, attempted adultery, split-second timing and a precariously happy ending.

After the great success they enjoyed in his lifetime they were neglected after his death, until the 1940s and 1950s, when productions by Jean-Louis Barrault and the Comédie-Française led a revival of interest in his works, at first in Paris and subsequently worldwide.

[18] The first of Feydeau's plays to be staged was a one-act two-hander called Par la fenêtre (Through the window) presented by the Cercle des arts intimes, an amateur society, in June 1882.

[19] In his biography of Feydeau Henry Gidel comments that it was not a representative audience, being composed of friends of society members, but it was nonetheless a test of a sort, and the play was enthusiastically received.

[20] The typical Feydeau characters and plot were already in evidence: a shy husband, a domineering wife, mistaken identities, confusion and a happy ending.

[23] After completing his compulsory military service (1883–84) Feydeau was appointed secrétaire général to the Théâtre de la Renaissance,[24] under the management of his friend Fernand Samuel.

Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique thought the play insubstantial, but, it enthused, "what gaiety in the dialogue, what good humour, what pleasing words, what fun in this childishness, what unforeseen things in this madness, what comic invention in this imbroglio, which obtained the most outright success one could wish to a beginner!

[29] He had a series of poor or mediocre runs in the late 1880s with La Lycéenne (a "vaudeville-opérette" with music by Gaston Serpette, 1887), Chat en poche (1888), Les Fiancés de Loches (1888 co-written with Maurice Desvallières), and L'Affaire Edouard (1889).

It was a genuine love-match (though it later went awry);[32] he was an ardent amateur painter, and his father-in-law gave him lessons;[33] and marriage into a well-to-do family relieved Feydeau of some of the financial problems arising from his succession of theatrical failures and heavy losses on the stock exchange.

[34] In 1890 Feydeau took a break from writing and made a study of the works of the leading comic playwrights, particularly Eugène Labiche, Alfred Hennequin and Meilhac.

[25] After receiving this news from the Palais-Royal, Feydeau met an old friend, Henri Micheau, the owner of the Théâtre des Nouveautés, who insisted on seeing the rejected script and immediately recognised it as a potential winner.

[43] At the same time, after a certain amount of similar manoeuvring on his own account,[44] Feydeau was appointed to the legion, at the early age of thirty-two, joining a small élite of French playwrights to receive the honour, including Dumas, Meilhac, Ludovic Halévy, Victorien Sardou and Becque.

The Annales du théâtre et de la musique, noting that the laughter reverberated inside and out of the auditorium, said that a reviewer could only laugh and applaud rather than criticise.

[48] Another critic, predicting a long run, wrote that he and his colleagues would not be needed at the Nouveautés in their professional capacities for a year or so, but would know where to come if they wanted to laugh.

[55] The author was used to working with and writing for established farceurs such as Alexandre Germain, who starred in many of his plays from Champignol malgré lui (1892) to On purge bébé!

[63] La Puce à l'oreille (A flea in her ear) (1907) won glowing reviews, and seemed set to become one of the author's biggest box-office successes, but after 86 performances a leading member of the cast, the much loved comic actor Joseph Torin, died suddenly and the play was withdrawn;[64] it was not seen again in Paris until 1952.

[71] He and Marie-Anne were divorced in 1916[72] and in 1918, now aged fifty-five, he embarked on an affair with a young dancer, Odette Darthys, whom he cast in the lead in revivals of his plays.

Je ne trompe pas mon mari (I don't cheat on my husband, 1914) with René Peter did well at the box office, with 200 performances, but in the view of Feydeau's biographer Leonard Pronko it has signs that "the dramatist had almost reached the end of his brilliant inventiveness".

[75] Feydeau had long been subject to depression, but in mid-1919 his family, alarmed at signs of a severe deterioration in his mental condition, called in medical experts; the diagnosis was dementia caused by tertiary syphilis.

[79] Feydeau wrote more than twenty comic monologues,[80] and provided librettos for the composers Gaston Serpette, Alfred Kaiser and Louis Varney,[81] but his reputation rests on those of his plays known in English as farces.

He said that he made so much money from La Dame de chez Maxim that he could afford to take two years' break from writing and devote himself instead to his hobby, painting.

Catulle Mendès wrote, "I continue to deplore the fact that M. Georges Feydeau uses his truly remarkable talent on plays that will be performed four or five hundred times but that will never be read".

[99] For the authors of Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique, and critics in Le Figaro his farces were what made Feydeau incomparable.

[66][67] Later critics including Gidel, Pronko, Marcel Achard and Kenneth Tynan have judged that in his farces Feydeau was second only to Molière as France's great comic dramatist.

The Comédie-Française admitted a Feydeau work to its repertoire for the first time in 1941, with a production of the one-act Feu la mère de Madame, directed by Fernand Ledoux, starring Madeleine Renaud and Pierre Bertin.

[126] English adaptations had been familiar in Feydeau's day,[127] and in the 1950s new versions began to appear, including Peter Glenville's Hotel Paradiso (1956, from L'Hôtel du libre échange)[128] and Noël Coward's Look After Lulu!

[132] This led to an invitation from Laurence Olivier to Charon to direct John Mortimer's adaptation of La Puce à l'oreille as A Flea in Her Ear for the National Theatre (1966).

[143] Other English adaptations included Peter Hall and Nicki Frei's versions of Le Dindon (1994, as An Absolute Turkey) and Occupe-toi d'Amélie!

[144] During the first two decades of the 21st century, the Comédie-Française presented seven Feydeau productions: Le Dindon (2002, directed by Lukas Hemleb),[145] Un Fil à la patte (2010 Jérôme Deschamps),[146] Quatre pièces – a quadruple bill of one-act plays and a monologue (Amour et Piano, Un monsieur qui n'aime pas les monologues, Fiancés en herbe and Feu la mère de madame, 2009, Gian Manuel Rau),[147] Le Cercle des castagnettes (monologues, 2012, Alain Françon),[148] Le Système Ribadier (2013, Zabou Breitman), L'Hôtel du libre-échange (2017, Isabelle Nanty)[149] and La Puce à l'oreille (2019, Lilo Baur).