La Dame de chez Maxim (play)
It depicts the complications ensuing when a respectable citizen becomes mixed up with a Moulin Rouge dancer after drinking too much champagne at Maxim's restaurant.
[4] La Dame de chez Maxim opened at the Théâtre des Nouveautés on 17 January 1899, and ran for 579 performances.
His wife, Gabrielle, enters and finds la Môme's dress on the floor and takes it, assuming it is one she had ordered from her dressmaker.
[7] At the general's château the provincial ladies are shocked but titillated by la Môme's free and easy behaviour and Parisian street-talk, including her catch phrase, "Eh!
La Môme sings a rude song, which, fortunately, the ladies do not understand – though the general's army colleagues do – and then dances a can-can.
[8] Back chez Petypon, the mistaken identities proliferate, and characters are frozen in mid-action at crucial moments by sitting in the ecstatic chair.
An amorous young duke lusting after "Mme Petypon" (la Môme) finds himself in the embrace of a rampaging Gabrielle.
Eventually the truth emerges, along with a reasonably plausible innocent explanation of the various impersonations, and everyone ends up with the appropriate partner, including the general and la Môme who go off affectionately together: she tells the assembled company, "Eh!
[9] The Paris correspondent of the London paper The Era reported, "[Feydeau's] new work is a masterpiece of jocoseness, abounding in frolicsome inventions, and overflowing with witty sayings.
[11] When the play was first revived, in 1910, Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique commented, "The comedy remains insanely funny, and with the unexpected twists and turns the hilarity hardly stops from the rise to the fall of the curtain.
[16] After the First World War, the bawdy plays of the Belle Eppque were now seen as naive, and Feydeau's body of work became neglected for many years; the next production in Paris was in 1965 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, directed by Jacques Charon, with Zizi Jeanmaire as la Môme and Pierre Mondy as Petypon.
Reviews were mixed: one reported that the play was irresistibly funny without being vulgar,[20] another felt that the adapters had "religiously and industriously sucked all the paint off this once highly colored French farce … disinfected and Americanized".
[31] In October 1977 the National Theatre in London presented an adaptation by John Mortimer, The Lady from Maxim's; it was directed by Christopher Morahan and starred Morag Hood and Stephen Moore.
