Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) is synonymous with Paris and La Belle Epoque and, by common consent, the greatest writer of bedroom farces. The Comedie Francaise reveres him second only to Moliere. He was the author of some 39 plays, which he wrote mainly to pay off his debts, which were so bad he had had to sell his collection of paintings – Corot, Daumier, Delacroix, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh – which he had bought when the artists were still unknown.
In 1903 Feydeau moved into a hotel for a week and stayed there for ten years until he suffered the cerebral haemorrhage, which eventually caused his death. He died in 1921 in a sanatorium convinced he was Emperor Napoleon 111.
His frenetic satires on the bourgeoisie and their sordid affairs are observed with clinical detachment and mathematical precision. His stage directions are meticulous (to the point of mania said Jean Cocteau) and built on the principle that if two characters should under no circumstances meet, they meet immediately.
The turning point in his fame in England came in 1966 when the National Theatre was at the Old Vic and invited Jacques Charon of the Comedie Francaise to direct A Flea in Her Ear (La Puce a l’Oreille premiered in Paris in 1909) in a translation by John Mortimer. It was one of the NT’s biggest critical and commercial successes. It is now happily revived by Richard Eyre.
A wife suspects her husband of being unfaithful. She persuades her best friend to write a letter from an anonymous admirer to her husband suggesting a rendezvous at the notorious Coq d’Or Hotel. The wife intends to be there and confront her husband; but her husband passes the letter on to a friend, who happens to be (I will let you find out for yourself).
The second act in the hotel with all the frantic comings and goings is hilarious. The farce is increased by the coincidence that the respectable husband and hotel’s moronic hall porter look exactly alike. Tom Hollander, who plays both roles with comic dexterity, is constantly changing his costume at lightening speed.
The other major comic role is a young man with a cleft palate who chatters away incomprehensibly and whose speech defect is used to further the plot. Freddie Fox, son of Edward Fox, is very funny.