Il teatro comico di Georges Feydeau II

Georges Feydeau (1862-1921) was a prodigious inventor of the comic genre. He did not renew vaudeville, but through all his plays he created a new one. Others, reproducing his bizarre sceneries gave us the illusion of imitating him, but he was inimitable, precisely because of his incessant inventiveness. Starting from an initial idea, Georges Feydeau was capable of giving free rein to his imagination and, as his characters followed a path, he invented dead-end streets for them, forcing them to discover for themselves doors or windows that even he had not suspected existed, and which he snatched from the unknown of everyday life. Anyone else would have lost their bearings. Georges Feydeau possessed the wonderful key of great observers. He would search his characters until he found in them the thread that would allow him to sew them up, to launch them again into the next adventure. Feydeau expected nothing from chance; he trusted only his deductions. The guys he staged were alive because of their authenticity, and anything that could happen to them became plausible, obvious, inevitable. (Régis Gignoux)

The book, besides presenting the famous Dame de Chez Maxim, contains comedies, one-act plays and monologues never translated before, all enriched by some in-depth essays analysing the works of Feydeau and Labiche, the comedy of Feydeau, and the most famous characters of the author’s plays.
(edited by Pasquale Calvino and Annamaria Martinolli. The book is in Italian language)