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Manchester Takes London by Storm: A Provincial Company Masters French Farce
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11840 |
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THE ARTS
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8 / 1987 |
1,288 Words |
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Herb Greer
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Like certain fragile wines, fin de siecle French farce does not always travel well. In crossing the English Channel, plays that should make an evening as light and delicious as a fine Monbazillac are transmogrified: The audience is deluged with English milk stout, poured from a vaguely French glass. This is what happened when the National Theatre took up the plays of Georges Feydeau, as translated by the slick and fashionable John Mortimer. Casts and directors bounded through them with a clodhopping Anglo-Saxon vigor, stirring up a heavy head of froth but very little laughter. Worse, the performances were punched through with the most annoying subtext to be found in the professional theater: "Look how jocose, look how FUNNY we are!" The ordeal of sitting through all this came close to putting me off the French-English genre altogether, and I still approach it warily in London.
Happiest Quality of Theater
However, the happiest quality of theater, especially very good theater, is that the best of it is never quite predictable. Manchester's Royal Exchange Theater Company has come to London with a glorious exception to the cross-Channel rule: Court in the Act opened at the Phoenix Theatre in Charing Cross Road like a gorgeous spring blossom, and the end of its run is not yet in sight. Once again Britain's second city has proved that it harbors the country's leading provincial repertory theater.
The original fin de siecle piece, La Presidente, was a collaboration between the Belgian-born farce writer Maurice Hennequin and Pierre Veber, who doubled in Parisian journalism and was also a drama critic for the New York Herald. The cheekily punning English title and the translation are also a double act, from Robert Cogo-Fawcett and Graham Murray, who is an artistic director at the Royal Exchange.
Court in the Act is more exciting in texture and content than the typical Feydeau play, which tends to rest on a solid base of middle-class morality, shaken and bent by permutations of scandal, marital deceit, and public embarrassment; the denouement leaves the audience with the comforting assurance that its endangered bourgeois values are, after all, secure and lasting. The Hennequin-Veber play celebrates something else; it vibrates with the spirit of an unapologetic Dionysus, shimmering with sexual fervor and high spirits in a manner that evokes the erotic paintings of Clovis Trouille.
I am not going to attempt a detailed account of the plot. This would be like describing a plate of vermicelli strand by strand, with footnotes on the sauce. Essentially the story spins round a straitlaced provincial magistrate, who is henpecked by an ugly wife with a manie for polishing brass. Through a series of amusing errors, the magistrate is entangled with a beautiful and sexy actress - just as the Minister of Justice arrives for a visit. The actress fails to seduce the magistrate but does spend the night with the Minister, who is totally besotted with her and takes her for the magistrate's wife. This embarrasses the magistrate, but suits his desperate wish to be promoted out of the dead country backwater. The Minister begins a series of clumsy maneuvers to shift the magistrate closer to Paris, and so make his "wife" more easily available. Eventually, the confusions are cleared up: The magistrate gets his promotion and the Minister gets his delectable mistress. The hilarious muddles on the way to this pleasant conclusion are abetted by a
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