An Italian Straw Hat E-Book

Eugène Labiche

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

Seitenzahl: 108

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A classic 19th-century French farce by Eugène Labiche. Fadinard is on the way to his wedding when his horse eats a straw hat hanging on a bush. The owner of the hat is a former girlfriend who insists that Fadinard buys her a new hat instantly. He sets off to find a replacement hat, followed by his fiancée and all their guests. The play develops into a delirious chase as Fadinard hunts the hat and the guests hunt Fadinard and comic misunderstandings litter every scene. Eugène Labiche's play An Italian Straw Hat was premiered at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris in 1851. This English version, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

AN ITALIANSTRAW HAT

byEugène Labiche and Marc-Michel

translated and introduced by

Kenneth McLeish

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Labiche: Key Dates

Characters

An Italian Straw Hat

Music Numbers

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Eugène-Marin Labiche (1815-88)

Labiche’s father manufactured glucose syrup, which was widely used both for cooking and as a drink (diluted with fruit-juice or water: the ‘sugar-water’ which people in An Italian Straw Hat drink so enthusiastically). The family was well-to-do without being rich and belonged precisely to the comfortable middle-class Labiche was later to satirise so uproariously. The boy was conventionally educated – his only intellectual gift, he later claimed, was a photographic memory which allowed him to pass exams by quoting textbooks verbatim – and he followed his parents’ wishes so far as to enrol for a law degree. But from the age of 18 he had begun to write, and after a few false starts (travel journalism, a novel, theatre criticism), he delivered his first play in 1837, and his career was set.

In the next 38 years Labiche wrote so many plays, scenes and sketches that he himself found it hard to remember them all. The ‘Complete Works: Series One’ he published in ten volumes in 1878-9 (as part of a campaign to be the first farce-writer given France’s highest literary honour, election to the Académie française) contains 57 plays, and scholars have tracked down another 107 (usually of less worth) to which his name can be definitely assigned. Following the custom of the time, he generally worked with at least one collaborator, and rewrote and revised during rehearsals and even – when plays were successful – during the runs themselves.

Like many theatre writers before and since, Labiche professed to hate the stage and everything to do with it. He used his royalties to buy a 500-hectare estate at Souvigny, some 120km South of Paris, and lived the life of a country farmer, spending half of each year there and travelling to Paris only for rehearsals. (He was a devotee of that recent development, the railway, and train-travel was one of his passions.) He spent time in local politics, and counted his election as Mayor of Souvigny in 1868 as one of the greatest moments of his life, equal to his election to the Académie française (1880) or the day when he saw his beloved son André graduate as Bachelor of Law.

A lover of good living – he once wrote that his cook and wine-cellar in Souvigny brought him far more pleasure than any of his plays – Labiche began to suffer serious health-problems in his mid-sixties. He wrote nothing more after the age of 65, and his last years, already clouded by the death of the wife to whom he was devoted, were tormented by gout and arthritis. He died at Souvigny in January 1888.

‘Marc-Michel’

Labiche’s collaborator on this play was Marc Antoine Amédée Michel (1812-68). He was an old college friend of Labiche, and worked on more than 100 farces: 50 with Labiche, 48 with other collaborators, and two on his own. On the style of his work and on the nature of his collaboration with Labiche, see ‘Labiche and Co’.

An Italian Straw Hat: What Happens in the Play

Fadinard, a wealthy Parisian bachelor, is about to marry Hélène, daughter of a suburban market-gardener. It is the morning of the wedding, and Hélène, her blustering father Nonancourt and eight cabfuls of guests are expected at any moment. Fadinard has galloped ahead to make final arrangements. On the way he has stopped to rest his horse, and the animal has eaten a straw hat hung on a bush while its owner dallies in the undergrowth with a soldier. The hat-woman and the soldier have followed Fadinard home, and he is horrified to find that the woman is a former girlfriend (with the most jealous husband in Paris). Her soldier lover demands a replacement hat, Fadinard rushes out to find one – and the newly-arrived wedding-party, thinking that he is on his way to the ceremony, jump into their cabs and follow him.

The rest of the play is a delirious chase, faster and faster as Fadinard hunts the hat and the guests hunt Fadinard. He goes to a hat-shop, and finds that its owner (another former girl-friend) has sold her last Italian straw hat to the Duchess of Champigny. (The guests mistake the hat-shop for a wedding-parlour and the clerk, Tardiveau, for the Mayor.) Fadinard visits the Duchess, who takes him for a tenor and hires him to sing for her party guests – a situation he exploits by agreeing to perform only if she hands over the Italian straw hat. But the Duchess has given it to her god-daughter, Madame Beauperthuis, and Fadinard once more rushes after it. (The wedding-guests, meantime, have taken the Duchess’s music-party for a reception and mingled with the aristocratic audience, to maximum confusion.)

At Madame Beauperthuis’s house, her husband is grumpily curing himself of a headache by soaking his feet in a mustard bath. His wife went out that morning to buy a pair of gloves, and hasn’t come back, and he, the most jealous husband in Paris, suspects the worst. Fadinard arrives and demands a straw hat with menaces. The wedding guests swarm after him, taking Beauperthuis’s house for a hotel and his bedroom for the bridal suite. Discovering to his horror that Beauperthuis’s wife is his former girlfriend from the beginning of the play (the one whose hat was eaten), Fadinard rushes out, followed by the enraged Beauperthuis and the wedding party.

Late that evening, in the square outside Fadinard’s house, Tardiveau (the hat-shop clerk the guests mistook for the Mayor) is on duty as a special constable. Just as everyone arrives onstage, it begins to rain. Fadinard faces harassment from the soldier for not finding the hat, trouble from Beauperthuis for seducing his wife, and fury from Nonancourt and the guests when they find out what’s been happening. There is a frantic argument, drawing in not only the main characters but a neighbour woken by the noise – and it ends only when one of the wedding-guests, Fadinard’s deaf old uncle Vézinet, produces his present, an Italian straw hat identical to the one eaten by the horse. Fadinard hands it to the soldier’s girlfriend, the tangle of cross-purposes is unravelled at last, Fadinard’s wedding is saved, and the play ends in a whirl of celebration.

Vaudeville and the ‘Well-Made’ Play

An Italian Straw Hat takes elements from two of the most popular forms of 19th-century French theatre, vaudeville and the ‘well-made’ play, and marries them. Vaudeville was satirical farce, lampooning the bourgeoisie and using slapstick, dance, song and such stock characters as dodderer, philanderer, pretty girl, jealous husband and peppery soldier. The ‘well-made’ play depended 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 – for the worse in a ‘well-made’ melodrama, for the better in a ‘well-made’ farce.

In serious drama, the ‘well-made’ formula led to such 19th-century masterpieces as Dumas’ The Lady of the Camellias, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or Sardou’s Tosca – not to mention such later examples as Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy or the ‘problem’ films and TV movies based on real court cases and popular in the 1980s and 1990s. In comedy it was used in thousands of farces, most of them deservedly forgotten but including such treasures as Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear and Labiche’s own Célimare. When Labiche began writing in the 1830s, dramatists were still experimenting with ways of writing ‘well-made’ farce, and it took him eleven years and two dozen plays to perfect and streamline the form: his A Young Man in a Hurry (1848) is one of the first masterworks of the genre.

An Italian Straw Hat

An Italian Straw Hat was first produced three years and 31 plays after A Young Man in a Hurry, at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris on April 14th, 1851. The theatre manager, Charles Dormeuil, staged it as a favour, since Labiche had already provided him with a dozen successes. But he was so unimpressed by what he called the play’s ‘wildness’ and inconsequentiality that he arranged to be out of Paris for the first night, hoping that all would be over and forgotten by the time he returned. So far from being a flop, however, An Italian Straw Hat triumphed. Critics described a ‘fireball of laughter’ running round the theatre; several people became so helpless with mirth that they had to be revived in the foyer, and one unfortunate had a fatal stroke; instead of the usual run of some 20 performances, the piece played to full houses, in repertoire, for the next eleven months, the equivalent of a run of years today.

Most unusually for a farce, An Italian Straw Hat won almost immediate acclaim not only from the public, but from critics and academics alike, one even going so far as to call it ‘Labiche’s Hamlet’. It was more frequently revived than any other of Labiche’s plays, and when he published his ‘Complete Works’ in 1878, he placed it first in the first volume. In the 80 years after its creation, it received more than 100 productions in France alone, and in 1938 it was taken into the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, where it has remained ever since: the renowned farce-actors Jacques Charon and Louis de Funès had particular success with it in the 1940s and 1950s. It was first played in English in the 1880s, and the first German translation appeared soon afterwards. Orson Welles directed a New York production in 1936 (retitled Horse Eats Hat, marred by over-frantic slapstick and starring, somewhat improbably in view of his later acting-style, Joseph Cotten). Comedians and actors of all kinds, from Jack Benny to Laurence Olivier, from Fernandel to Tom Conti, have played the part of Fadinard. The play had enormous influence on sketch-comedians in music-hall, for example those of Fred Karno’s Circus in the 1900s. Many of them, in turn, emigrated to the US, and carried the style into early silent films: both straightforward slapstick (such as the films of the Keystone Cops) and subtler, more satirical farce (such as the films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd) owe debts to its style, structure and approach. The finest silent film of the play itself was made by René Clair in 1927 – a masterpiece to which dozens of later comedian-directors acknowledged debts, including Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Tati and Jerry Lewis. In another memorable film version, made in 1941, Fernandel repeated his stage triumph: a forgotten gem. And in Britain, at least, the play has had its influence in other media: notably, on the construction of TV sitcoms, for example those of John Cleese and Connie Booth, whose character of Basil Fawlty and whose scripts for Fawlty Towers, with their meticulous escalations of lunacy, were the fruit of much reading of Feydeau and Labiche.

After a century and a half of such influences, it can be hard to appreciate just how original An Italian Straw Hat actually was, and is. Until this play, the exuberance and satirical abundance of vaudeville lacked a formal structure, and pieces were either short (like the 20-minute sketches of music-hall or pantomime) or sprawling and undisciplined. Conversely, ‘well-made’ farces had a strictly-organised form but nothing much to say: dullness of content is a major fault in the work even of experts like Scribe. Labiche’s stroke of genius in An Italian Straw Hat was to marry the two styles.

The play takes the form of the picaresque quest (a centuries-old standby of such ‘grand’ literature as the Odyssey, Don Quixote or Tom Jones) and spoofs it by turning up the speed, so that instead of a years-long ramble through someone’s life, we have a twelve-hour gallop from breakfast to bedtime, and the object of the whole exercise is not self-discovery or full philosophical understanding, but a fancy hat with ribbons.

On to this structure Labiche grafts all the techniques of ‘well-made’ farce. Instead of one secret, known to the audience but only gradually revealed to the characters, there are dozens. Nothing is what the characters think it is: even the final dénouement depends on some of the people taking one Italian straw hat for another. There is plentiful quiproquo (‘misunderstanding’), not only of words (for example when deaf old Vézinet hears one thing and thinks it means another) but of places and of people. Anaïs, who appears to be no more than a soldier’s floozie, turns out first to be Fadinard’s ex-girlfriend and then the wife of Beauperthuis. Clara, the hat-shop owner, is revealed as another of Fadinard’s old flames, and her clerk is taken for a Mayor and later becomes a constable. Fadinard himself is mistaken for an opera-singer and a burglar. A hat-shop is a Mayor’s parlour, a Duchess’s villa a hotel, a bourgeois bedroom a bridal suite, and so on. In most ‘well-made’ farces there is just one scène à faire (‘busy scene’), during which enormous confusion is gradually, painfully and hilariously untangled; in An Italian Straw Hat