Summary
Georges Feydeau: Bug in the ear
Georges Feydeau, the incomparable writer of comedies and vaudeville, is one of the most interesting personalities in the history of world theater. He wrote his first play (in two acts) at the age of ten, which is why he was called the "Mozart of the theater", and later proved to be an excellent actor, director and painter. In the frantic years at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when people wanted to have fun at all costs, Feydeau spent his days and nights in cafes and theaters, and in the little free time he managed to write about forty comedies!
Buba u ear, a play in 3 acts, was performed for the first time in 1907 with an unprecedented success with both the audience and the critics. In fact, it was a real triumph! One critic wrote: »It is a play for which a new qualitative adjective should be invented: funny, fun, comical, mischievous, dizzying; all that, and much more." Nevertheless, behind everything funny and upside down in the lives and natures of doctors, insurers, hoteliers, business people and their companions and servants, perhaps the author's darkest and most defeating criticism of his contemporaries and society as known by world dramaturgy is easily discernible. In that chase, love adventures, marital triangles and infidelities, Feydeau's heroes, deprived of real personality, thoughts and feelings, are cruelly punished - with laughter! No joke, Feydeau is not only great, he is a serious, concerned writer, who described his time and the people around him with contempt, bitterness and mockery, without pathos or moralizing, like no one before or after him!
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