La Dame de chez Maxim

How did I become a writer of vaudeville? Simple. By laziness. Mere laziness. What? That amazes you? Then you are ignorant of the fact that laziness is the miraculous, fertile mother of work. And I say miraculous, because the father is completely unknown.
Feydeau

Nothing demands more organization and method than that fantastic, disorder-producing machine, a play by Feydeau. His plots are of a frightening, enigmatic logic (critics have often said that his plots are tight, convincing, and totally impossible to summarize after the show). Nobody has played as he has with vaudevillian crises, nightmarish meetings, hysterical impasses and their outrageous resolutions. So how can one possibly summarize The Girl from Maxim ? Let's just say that in this play the most rigid of proprieties (like those that govern a provincial marriage among the haut bourgeoisie) and the most unrestrained licentiousness (like that which knocks over furniture and produces alcohol-induced amnesia) are all crudely telescoped together with catastrophic drollery. Or one could also say that it's the story of a bull in a china shop, where a nightclub dancer of unforgettable verve and spirit plays the bull and just about everybody else plays the china. Or, in short, since one really can't sum up what labyrinths of paroxysmal buffoonery Feydeau drags his public into, let's simply, as a last resort, quote Henry Gidel: "The Girl from Maxim is a vaudeville version of Claudel's The Satin Slipper." The story of the encounter between the respectable Doctor Petypon and la Môme Crevette - which was from its earliest production a world-wide success - is also the masterpiece of the king of light comedy - théâtre du boulevard - a dazzling conjurer and implacable technician whose skill at comic writing transformed even the most reticent of his contemporaries into very willing victims: "How can you win an argument with somebody who sends you into stitches?" asked Catulle Mendès. What is Feydeau's secret? In any event he's the sum total of someone who is profoundly serious, refuses any indulgency whatsoever, and is obsessive in the meticulousness he brings to his craft. To take on a production of Feydeau implies working as he did on the intelligence of his dialogue and the precision of his constructions. Intelligence, because Feydeau scatters his different scenes with a quantity of details the accumulation of which, even without the audience realizing it, contributes to intensifying the pressure of the comic atmosphere. And precision because the rhythm of vaudeville, enormously subtle, demands of all the actors and actresses involved total and complete collaboration at every moment. But after staging King Lear and The Death of Danton Jean-François Sivadier, an artist in his field associated with TNB, can be sure of his team and their affinity for acting collectively at a moment when he undertakes a complete change in style finally to take on - with keen anticipation - the unrivaled master of Cartesian nonsense and his playful, cruel theater.