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There is no human drama that does not offer at least some comic aspects. – Georges Feydeau

Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) was born in Paris to Lodzia Zelewska, an infamous Polish beauty in Parisian high society, and Ernest Feydeau, a poet and journalist who had had a fleeting literary succes de scandale with his erotic novel, Fanny. It was rumored at the time, and Feydeau played on this rumor later in life, that he was in fact the son of either Napoleon III or the Duc de Morny.

Of the 39 plays written by Feydeau, his most celebrated were his bedroom farces, telling of the high life of the low life in Paris’s ‘’demi-monde.’’ They are noted for great wit and complex plots, featuring misunderstandings and coincidences. His dramas were highly popular at the time, foreshadowing and influencing Ionesco and Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd, and he is now considered to be the greatest French comic dramatist after Moliere.

His most notable farces are probably A Flea in Her Ear (La Puce à l’Oreille, 1907) Heart’s Desire Hotel, (L’Hôtel du libre échange, 1894), Sauce for the Goose (Le Dindon, 1896), and The Lady from Maxim’s (La Dame de chez Maxim, 1899).

In 1889, Feydeau married Marianne Carolus-Duran, the daughter of a famous and wealthy portrait painter. Despite being a phenomenally successful playwright, his propensity for high living, gambling and the failure of his marriage were to lead to financial difficulties.

By 1909, Feydeau’s unhappy marriage had driven him to leave his home and take up residence at the Hotel Terminus. While separated from his wife, Feydeau wrote five one-act plays which portrayed marriage as a battleground between partners. These works, much more compact and biting than the earlier bedroom farces, are often referred to as Feydeau’s ‘conjugal farces’. Two of these, Purging The Baby (On purge bébé, 1910) and Leonie’s Early (Léonie est en avance, ou le mal joli, 1911) were translated and adapted by Geoff Hoyle into our production of For Better or Worse. During the winter of 1918 Feydeau contracted syphilis and his children were eventually forced to have him committed to a sanatorium where he slowly descended into madness before his death in 1921.

For Better or Worse
“It was with surprise and excitement that I discovered the five acerbic one-act comedies of marital discord written towards the end of Feydeau’s life in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. All five paint a picture of marriage as a battlefield where two egos stubbornly struggle through a series of never-ending disputes over trivialities. He had intended to publish them under the title, From Marriage to Divorce.

All of Feydeau’s plays deal in love and its frustrations, as he casts a witheringly ironic eye on the deviousness of the human animal, poking holes in the fabric of bourgeois respectability, pretension and conformity.

But he never lost his touch as a comic playwright. In the final plays, the usual serpentine and frantic plot of the ‘door-slammers’ is replaced by a single situation that spirals out of control causing frustration, general confusion and eventually, in Bastien Follavoine and the ‘heroes’ of the four other plays, something close to mental despair. Critic and writer, Marcel Achard describes these plays as “savage minuets” or “Strindberg through a fairground mirror.” There is hilarity and absurdity but there is also the pain of dysfunction verging on madness. The only door slammed in these comedies is when wife or husband leaves in a rage of self-righteousness or a fit of despair.”

– Geoff Hoyle