The Italian Straw Hat (play)

The Italian Straw Hat (Un chapeau de paille d'Italie) is a five-act comedy by Eugène Labiche and Marc-Michel.

The play is set in Paris in the middle of the 19th century, on the morning of the day on which Fadinard, a well-to-do bachelor, is to marry Hélène Nonancourt, daughter of a suburban market-gardener.

[n 1] He wrote his version under the pen name of "F. Latour Tomline", moving the action to London and suppressing the adulterous aspect of the original.

[11] A London West End production in 1987 starred Tom Conti; the adaptation by Ray Cooney followed the original plot but broadened the comedy somewhat.

[13] A later American adaptation, Horse Eats Hat by Edwin Denby and Orson Welles, was presented at Maxine Elliott's Theatre in 1936, with Joseph Cotten in the lead role.

[19] A Russian film was made in 1974, titled The Straw Hat (Соломенная шляпка), directed by Leonid Kvinikhidze and starring Andrei Mironov.

On radio, Laurence Payne and Geraldine McEwan featured in 1960, and in 1969 John Moffatt starred as Fadinard in Glyn Dearman's translation.

In 1968 BBC television showed a new version of the play, adapted by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin, with Patrick Cargill in the lead.

[27] In 2005 the National Ballet of Canada presented an adaptation of the play, choreographed by James Kudelka to an original score by Michael Torke.

He summarises vaudevilles as "satirical farce, lampooning the bourgeoisie and using slapstick, dance, song and such stock characters as dodderer, philanderer, pretty girl, jealous husband and peppery soldier"; he contrasts this with "well-made" plays, which centred on a tightly-organised plot in which "the entire action was motivated by some secret involving the main character, a secret revealed only gradually as the play proceeded, until by the final curtain full knowledge had completely changed everyone's lives".

[2] McLeish writes that An Italian Straw Hat, unusually for a farce, "won almost immediate acclaim not only from the public, but from critics and academics alike".