Georges Feydeau and the Aesthetics of Farce by Stuart E. Baker (review)

Abstract

394 Book Reviews Underlying such bourgeois laughter is a sense of justice societal in its scope and, therefore, essentially different from that infonning the absolute comic with its cosmic dimension of the carnival spirit and its "scapegoats" conceived as sinners against Nature, We simply have to realize that the term "farce" has undergone radical formal and semantic changes, and Pronko is keenly aware of the emphasis placed by Labiche and Feydeau on theatricality, speed, gaiety, absurdity. and the colorful language employed by these playwrights. He speaks of Labiche's development of the chase, played at a devilish pace in Un Chapeau de paille d' Italie, a pace that in Rene Clair's acclaimed film version of the play became a vaudeville-cauchemar, and that inspired many of Feydeau's comedies. "Like Labiche," Pronko tells us, "Peydeau understood that 'movement is the essential condition of theater. ,,, But Peydeau also understood the comic effect of physical handicaps: a stutter, a limp, a shrug. He was a brilliant stage director. capable of manipulating precisely the large number of characters he introduced into several of his plays. He indicated in "impressive detail the decor, props, movement of the actors, and even on occasion the exact tone or intonation of a phrase," sometimes writing out musical notations for certain passages or words, and giving infinite care to timing. Yet the growing acclaim awarded these playwrights is proof that their version of farce recaptured the dance of life in all of its vitality, even though it restricted itselfto the realm of the bourgeois, unconcerned with laws of Nature and camivalesque justice. EDITH KERN, THE NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH STUART E. BAKER. Georges Feydeau and the Aesthetics ofFarce. Ann Arbor, ML UMI Research Press 1981. Pp. xi, 163. $39.95. Years ago, when I decided to write a dissertation on the theater of Georges Feydeau, all my fellow graduate students (and nota few afmy professors) had to ask me who he was. That would not happen today. He has, over the years, earned his place as the master of French farce, second only to Moliere, in the judgment of many, as a French comic playwright. His name has become synonymous with intricately crafted imbroglios leavened with the wittiest of dialogue and not a little social commentary. Along with this posthumous popUlarity has come a spate of learned articles, monographs and books, in France and abroad, devoted to Feydeau's life and theater. The Boulevard entertainer has made it into Academe (much though that might have surprised and amused him). And rightly so. Any playwright who knows the secret of doubling up his audiences with relentless laughter deserves to have his technique analyzed - for cerebral, if not visceral satisfaction - even if (truistically) any analysis, however probing, pales before the plays themselves. ] tend to look askance at works that purport to tell me why I laugh. They speak to the head, while laughter - at least the belly laugh of farce - is, ipso facto, a product of the gut. Still, it is worth a try, even if one wonders whether, like the beauty of the butterfly's wing, the laughter of comedy (and especially of farce) can really be analyzed at all. Although the almost geometrical construction of Feydeau's masterpieces has been recognized and admired for generations, it is only recently that it has been systematical1y studied. One of the worthy attempts at dramatic anatomy is Stuart E. Baker's Georges Book Reviews 395 Feydeau and the Aesthetics of Farce. A revised doctoral thesis (1976), it is a straightforward, informed and informative introduction to the theater of the eminent farceur, written in an appropriately scholarly manner, but not stuffily so. Baker leads the reader very convincingly through observations on the aesthetics offarce, in general, and the elements ofFeydeau's plots, structures, and characterizations, in particular. Without revealing startling new insights. he pulls together and develops notions that othercritics, here and abroad, have voiced in varying degrees: the stages of Feydeau's career, the systematic madness and special brand of fantasy that pervade his theater. the "absurd" in his farces, the power of objects to victimize his heroes (or antiheroes), etc. He does so, for the most part, with...