A House Bath and Madame’s Late Mother by Georges Feydeau

A House Bath, British Premiere

At night, Madame wants to have a bath, being prepared with much attention by the maid. When Madame changes her mind, the maid decides she might have one, when suddenly Monsieur comes back…  

Madame’s Late Mother, British Premiere

At 4 O’clock in the morning, a row: she wants to sleep, he comes back from a party. Suddenly the doorbell rings…

Georges Feydeau

The Genius of French comedy brought back to the London stage. Georges Feydeau is an illegitimate son of Napoléon III. Very young, he neglected school to make theatre. Inspired by Maxim’s Cancan, la belle époque, he wrote some vaudeville masterpieces mocking the bourgeoisie such as A Flea in Her Ear and Sauce for the Goose. Feydeau made France laugh through his vaudevillian farces, and, in the process, dominated the genre. Some have seen in Feydeau a precursor of Dadaism, surrealism, and the absurd.  

“Beneath the frenetically joyous surface is a vision of the world in explosion,” Feydeau said.

About

The performances offer somewhat of an existentialist view of an absurd universe where men and women confront a hostile world in which the innocent suffer with no hope of comic resolution. Feydeau’s work had an undercurrent of pessimism, with many of the characters bringing suffering upon themselves by their affectation, over-ambition, and romantic and idealistic notions. While Feydeau’s basic premise may be founded in reality, the characters and plot are quickly pushed into the realm of the irrational. He was not an experimenter or an innovator, but an exploiter of the farcical possibilities inherent in the dramatic conventions that he adopted.

His characters are ordinary people who are aggressive and, at times, cruel. While his plays are known for their nonsense, fantasy, and bedroom farce, they are also known for their sense of madness and their geometric precision. Lurking beneath the surface is insanity, and a vision of a conflicted world.