A Flea in Her Ear E-Book

Georges Feydeau

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 154

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A classic French farce of infidelity and mistaken identity. A suspicious wife sets a trap to expose her supposedly faithless husband. The husband however bears an uncanny resemblance to a drunken porter, and when circumstances bring the two into proximity in the seedy Hotel Casablanca, all hell breaks loose. Georges Feydeau's play A Flea in Her Ear (La puce à l'oreille) was first performed at the Théâtre des Nouveautés in Paris in March 1907. This English translation by Kenneth McLeish is published in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, with an introduction by Stephen Mulrine.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

A FLEA IN HER EAR

byGeorges Feydeau

translated by Kenneth McLeishwith an introduction by Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction and Translator’s Note

For Further Reading

Feudeau: Key Dates

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Georges Feydeau (1862-1921)

In the last tragic phase of his life, confined in a sanatorium, Feydeau’s mental illness took the form of believing himself to be the Emperor Napoleon III, to the extent of affecting the latter’s goatee beard, and sending letters to his friends inviting them to attend his coronation at Notre Dame. By a bizarre twist, Feydeau was himself rumoured to have been an illegitimate son of Napoleon III, and his upbringing is as curious, in many respects, as his plays.

Feydeau’s father Ernest was a writer of some reputation, at the extremes of the literary spectrum. His best-known work, the salacious novel Fanny, published in 1858, was denounced from the pulpit by the Archbishop of Paris, and so successfully promoted thereby, that later editions were printed with an ironic dedication. Ernest Feydeau, who counted Flaubert and Théophile Gautier among his friends, was also a scholar, however, and the year of his son Georges’ birth, 1862, was marked by the publication of his History of Funeral and Burial Practices Among Early Peoples.

By his own account, Georges Feydeau wrote his first play around the age of six or seven, following a visit to the theatre, and thereafter, with his father’s encouragement, used his ‘playwriting’ to avoid doing his homework. Throughout his school years in Paris, first at the Lycée Saint-Louis, then the Collège Sainte-Barbe, Feydeau continued to write, and perform when the opportunity arose, and after leaving college, he joined an amateur theatre group.

In 1883, at the age of twenty-one, Feydeau had a one-act comedy, Amour et piano (Love and Piano), accepted for professional production by one of the leading Parisian companies, at the Théâtre de l’Athénée, and its success determined his long-term ambition to write for the stage. And indeed a few years later, in 1887, the spectacular triumph of his first full-length play, Tailleur pour dames (Ladies’ Tailor), written while he was serving in the army, gave promise of a glittering career. Unfortunately, there followed several lean years, in creative terms, and Feydeau even gave up writing for a time, in order to study his craft. Then, in the winter of 1892, he was summoned to a meeting with the director of the Palais-Royal theatre, to discuss two plays Feydeau had sent him six months previously. One of them, Champignol malgré lui (Champignol in Spite of Himself), he was advised to put away in a drawer and forget; the other, Monsieur Chasse (The Master is Hunting), would be accepted for production. Feydeau was ecstatic, the barren years were over.

By an extraordinary chance, as he made his way home rejoicing, Feydeau bumped into another director, Micheau, of the Théâtre des Nouveautés. Micheau’s theatre was on the verge of bankruptcy, and in desperation he begged Feydeau to let him read the play he was carrying. Having just had the piece rejected, Feydeau was reluctant, but Micheau insisted. It almost goes without saying that Champignol malgré lui not only rescued the Théâtre des Nouveautés, it ran for over a thousand performances, three times as many as Monsieur Chasse at the Palais-Royal, and established Feydeau as the leading comedy writer of the day.

From then on, Feydeau could do no wrong, and one triumph succeeded another, at a work-rate that appeared to give the lie to his self-confessed pathological idleness. Rehearsals were regularly well advanced before the plays were completed, and in the case of Occupe-toi d’Amélie (Keep an Eye on Amélie, also known as Look after Lulu), for example, the actors had already spent several weeks rehearsing the first two acts, with no idea of how its intricate plot was to be resolved, until Feydeau appeared and wrote the final scenes in the course of an evening.

With success came fame and riches, and there is some truth in Feydeau’s claim to be fundamentally lazy. Little is known in detail about his private life, but he was virtually a fixture in the café-bars and restaurants of Belle Epoque Paris. Gifted with the kind of looks often described as ‘devilishly handsome’, Feydeau was the epitome of the sophisticated boulevardier, and his image even graced the Illustrated Larousse encyclopaedia under the entry on moustaches. During this time, Feydeau gambled heavily on the stock market, losing a fortune in the process, and it may be argued that it was only his mounting debts that kept him writing, as he created the great plays of his maturity – Un Fil à la patte (Cat Among the Pigeons), L’Hôtel du Libre-Echange (Hotel Paradiso), Le Dindon (The Dupe), La Dame de chez Maxim (The Lady from Maxim’s), La Main passe (It’s Your Deal), La Puce à l’oreille (A Flea in Her Ear), and Occupe-toi d’Amélie.

To a considerable extent, Feydeau’s comedic mission might be summed up in Chaucer’s phrase, ‘to speak of the woe that is in marriage’, and his own home life was far from idyllic. Between 1908 and 1916, indeed, Feydeau wrote several one-act plays, widely regarded as among his best, and featuring a shrewish wife, said to have been modelled on his own wife Marianne, whom he married in 1889. Feydeau even proposed publishing these in a separate collection, to be titled ‘From Marriage to Divorce’.

At any rate, in 1910, following a violent domestic row, Feydeau took up permanent residence in the Hotel Terminus, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, in a room eventually so crammed with books, and his precious collection of paintings and perfumes, that he had to write on a drawing-board propped up on his knees. Feydeau’s habit increasingly was to sit on at Maxim’s or the Napolitain until the small hours, then walk his friends home, reluctant to return to his lonely hotel room.

Feydeau wrote nothing after 1916, and the play he left unfinished, Cent millions qui tombent (A Hundred Million Windfall), in fact dates back to 1911, when the first two acts had been rehearsed at the Théâtre des Nouveautés. In 1919, diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia, Feydeau entered the sanatorium at Rueil, and there this most cerebral of dramatists passed his final, tragic years, progressively losing his reason, until he died on 5 June, 1921.

A Flea in Her Ear: What Happens in the Play

A Flea in Her Ear is perhaps Feydeau’s best-known play, certainly to English audiences, and its intricate choreography draws together two classic farce plots – that of the suspicious wife who sets a trap to expose her faithless partner, and the venerable comic device of mistaken identity. And the latter complicates the former to such a degree that by the end of Act II, the spectator is almost as exhausted, mentally, as Feydeau’s characters are, physically, by their manic pursuit of each other across the stage, in a flurry of whirling doors and spinning beds.

Feydeau’s plays are a form of perpetual motion, and almost impossible to summarise, but taken by itself, the mistaken identity plot is comparatively straightforward: the supposed unfaithful husband, Chandebise, bears an uncanny resemblance to a drunken porter, Poche (both parts are played by the same actor), and when circumstances bring the two into proximity, in the seedy Hotel Casablanca, all hell breaks loose. Those circumstances arise through the workings of the main plot, set in motion with the entry of the principal characters, midway through Act I, when Chandebise’s wife Raymonde confesses to her friend Lucienne that she suspects her husband of infidelity, while Chandebise himself, a little later, complains to Dr Finache about a worrying, and inexplicable, loss of sexual vigour.

Raymonde’s suspicion – the ‘flea in her ear’ of Feydeau’s title, La puce à l’oreille – is more accurately rendered in English as ‘a bee in her bonnet’, but she believes it to be well founded, not only in her husband’s recent coolness towards her, but also the evidence of a pair of his braces, delivered by post from the said notorious hotel. In fact, the braces had been borrowed, and accidentally left there by his nephew Camille, who, we have already learned, is having an affair with Antoinette, the family cook, and wife of Chandebise’s valet Etienne.

At any rate, Raymonde is determined to obtain proof, and at Lucienne’s suggestion, decides to send him an anonymous letter, inviting him to an assignation with a mysterious female admirer – at the Hotel Casablanca, naturally. And so that Chandebise will not recognise her handwriting, Raymonde persuades Lucienne to write it for her. Chandebise is flattered to receive the note, but as a genuinely devoted spouse, he gives it to his friend Tournel. To complicate matters further, Tournel is himself attempting to seduce Raymonde behind her husband’s back.

Having baited her trap, as she imagines, Raymonde then goes off to the hotel to observe her husband keeping his clandestine appointment with Lucienne. In the interim, however, Chandebise shows off his letter to Lucienne’s fiercely jealous husband Homenides, a hot-blooded Latin American, who instantly recognises the handwriting as his wife’s and threatens to kill everyone involved. Chandebise is forced to admit that Tournel has gone to the hotel in his stead, and after locking Chandebise into his room, so that he can’t interfere, Homenides sets out to wreak vengeance on the pair.

In a bid to avert disaster, Chandebise’s nephew then tries to warn Tournel. Camille, however, suffers from a cleft palate, which Dr Finache has successfully treated with a silver prosthetic plate, but without which his speech is utterly incomprehensible. Needless to say, he has mislaid the device at the crucial moment, so that his warning falls on uncompre-hending ears, and Act I thus ends with both pairs of spouses, and Tournel, heading for the Hotel Casablanca and near-certain mayhem.

The action of Act II thus shifts to the hotel, and it is typical of Feydeau’s meticulous plotting that almost the entire cast of Act I will make their way there, for a variety of good reasons: Camille, for example, has arranged to meet Antoinette at the hotel, and since he shares his surname with his uncle, Chandebise, his pre-booked room becomes another source of confusion. And apart from the alcoholic porter Poche, Chandebise’s double, Feydeau also introduces a new set of characters: the hotel manager Ferraillon, an ex-army type with a taste for kicking backsides, notably that of Poche, who seems almost to enjoy it, as does Ferraillon’s wife Olympe; the hotel maid, Eugénie; Baptistin, Ferraillon’s senile old uncle; and finally Rugby, an English guest at the hotel, impatiently awaiting his ‘blind date’ for the evening, and ready to pounce on any female who crosses his path.

Not content with that, Feydeau prescribes a revolving bed-cumwall for the room, adding to the rich potential offered by its several doors, for shock entrances and exits. Naturally, the suspicious wife, Raymonde, is among the first to arrive at the Hotel Casablanca; to her astonishment, however, it is not Chandebise she finds in the bedroom, but Tournel, who seizes the opportunity to press his case as her lover, especially now that she knows her husband is blameless. While they argue over the exact parameters of their affaire, a chance rotation of the bed brings on the drunken Poche, whom they of course mistake for Chandebise. Tournel and Raymonde beg his forgiveness, which Poche obligingly grants.

Camille and Antoinette then appear, and they too mistake Poche for Chandebise. And after a flurry of panic-stricken entrances and exits, Antoinette winds up in the arms of the lecherous Englishman, Camille again loses his silver false palate, and Chandebise’s valet Etienne, hurrying to warn Lucienne about her jealous husband’s intentions, catches his own wife in flagrante. However, before Antoinette can explain, a new wave of arrivals brings on first Lucienne, then Chandebise, who has also come to warn her, and finally the murderous Homenides, at which point they flee for their lives, scattering in all directions.

In a further twist, the hotel manager Ferraillon mistakes Chandebise for his errant porter, and after kicking him energetically round the room, forces him into Poche’s livery. When the latter does appear, and unable to find his own clothes, puts on those discarded by the wretched Chandebise, the mix-up takes a new turn: Raymonde runs into her husband, but believes he is Poche; Lucienne then encounters Poche, mistakes him for Chandebise, and implores him to save her. Poche helpfully leads her into the adjoining room, just in time to escape her enraged husband. When Homenides finds the room empty, however, he fires his pistol at the button which controls the rotating bed, exposing the terrified Lucienne, and Poche, whom he also mistakes for Chandebise, and the act ends in a furious chase, as everyone tries to restrain the crazed Homenides.

Act III returns the action to the Chandebise house, with the char acters now augmented by the hotel staff, and the confusion un dim inished. In the opening scene, Antoinette, with the help of a bribed witness, manages to convince Etienne that she was nowhere near the Hotel Casablanca. Poche then arrives from the hotel to return his borrowed clothes, and Dr Finache, believing him to be Chandebise, declares he has lost his sanity. The real Chandebise, on his arrival, is again attacked by Ferraillon, and Poche in turn is pursued by Homenides, and forced to leap out of the window to save his skin.

Homenides, however, chances upon the draft copy of his wife Lucienne’s ‘anonymous’ letter to Chandebise, and the doubt this raises in his mind is confirmed by Raymonde, so that he finally realises his suspicions are unfounded, and forgives Lucienne. He in turn explains the true situation to Chandebise, concerning Raymonde and Tournel, and the play ends in reconciliation all round.

Feydeau the Dramatist

Feydeau’s comedy grows naturally out of the tradition of the pièce bien faite, the ‘well-made play’, as perfected by the mid-century French playwrights Scribe and Sardou – carefully motivated actions in rapid sequence, jumping middle-class characters with little psychological depth through various emotional and physical hoops until the obligatory happy ending is achieved, and all mysteries explained. In Feydeau’s day, the pièce bien faite was already yielding ground, under fire from the Symbolist avant-garde, at Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, and the Naturalists at Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, but in Feydeau’s hands it becomes a precision instrument, likened by one French critic to a ‘Strasbourg clock, complete with mechanical figures’, and indeed timing and movement are the essence of all his work.

Feydeau himself describes the workings of his plays in mechanistic terms, and in practice he calculated every effect to the precise second, leaving nothing to chance. His instructions to the actors who were to perform his comedies are fantastically detailed, often a hundred pages of notes, on stage furnishings, costume, production, interpretation; on one occasion, Feydeau even supplied music to ensure that a sequence of wordless exclamations would be pitched correctly. As the critic Marcel Achard observes, playwrights in general dream of one play, but write another, while the actors perform a third, and the audience sees a fourth – not so with Feydeau.

At various times, Feydeau described the creative process in terms of clock-making, engineering, or chess-playing, but his best-known analogy is with the work of the chemist:

While I am organising those lunacies which will unleash hilarity in the audience, I am not myself amused by them, but rather maintain the calm, serious demeanour of a chemist preparing a medicine. Into my little pill I introduce a gramme of imbroglio, a gramme of libertinage, a gramme of observation. I then mix these elements together, to the best of my ability, and can predict almost exactly the effect they will produce  . . .

If we are to take him at face value, Feydeau likewise reduces the complex relationships in his plays to a simple, brutal formula:

‘There are two principal characters: the one who delivers the kicks to the backside, and the one who receives them  . . .

And the world which they inhabit is:

Shut in upon itself, self-sufficient, perfectly logical, mathematically exact: thus, everything has to work towards a wholesale credulity  . . .

Even the disastrous chance encounters, upon which so much of Feydeau’s comedy turns, are the outcome of abstract calculation:

When I am writing a play, I search among my characters for those who absolutely should not meet. And those are the ones I bring together as quickly as possible  . . .

Achard describes Feydeau’s plays as possessing ‘la poésie comique de la table de logarithmes’ (‘the comical poetry of the log table’), and faced with the task of analysing his work, commentators routinely reach for a mathematical analogy. Indeed, for much of its length, Henry Gidel’s admirable study of Feydeau’s plays actually resembles a mathematics textbook, with its graphs, bar charts, sine wave diagrams, etc., demonstrating the ebb and flow of a typical Feydeau farce. Over the course of A Flea in Her Ear, for example, there are almost three hundred entrances and exits. What this kind of analysis shows, act by act, is the accelerating pattern of movement in the play, as the doors open and close with increasing frequency towards each act curtain. This is particularly true of Act II, where Feydeau strains his cat’s cradle of mischance to near breaking-point.

The Act II curtain in fact merely interrupts the chaos, which continues at the same pitch for part of Act III, until the process of dénouement or unravelling begins. One scene, midway through the last act, will serve to illustrate how masterfully Feydeau plays on the spectator’s emotions, measured in terms of events affecting Chandebise, and his reaction to them. In the space of two pages, Chandebise is first relieved, as he enters the drawing-room to find his persecutor Ferraillon gone, then panicked, when the fiercely jealous husband Homenides rushes in; Homenides then declares he will not fire his revolver, and Chandebise breathes again; alas, Homenides opens his pistol case instead, and there follows a further sequence of alternating relief and alarm as the two talk at cross-purposes, until Homenides finally aims his pistol; Chandebise then flees from the salon in terror, only to find his ‘double’ Poche in his own bedroom. Expressed as classical perepeteia, sudden dramatic reversals of fortune or mood, Chandebise’s emotions are thus raised and lowered, along with the spectator’s, no fewer than ten times during one brief scene.