Cuckolds in Cuckoo Land

THERE'S ONE IN EVERY MARRIAGE by GEORGES FEYDEAU

In the classic bedroom farces of Georges Feydeau, sex is not in the mind, the heart or the groin; it is in the feet. His bourgeois lechers stalk women in the streets, jog from bedroom to bedroom, jump into the wrong beds, kick open the wrong doors, and are finally caught flat-footed in the tangled web of their own deceit. The goal of a Feydeau play is ostensibly the bed, but is actually bedlam.

Feydeau's beds and bedlam are most happily with us again in the 1896 work Le Dindon (The Turkey), here entitled There's One in Every Marriage. Following a Feydeau plot is like trying to trail a snake through a bayou. It exists by twists and turns, sudden panics and slithery asides.

In this play, the philandering Pontagnac (Peter Donat) has tracked Lucienne (Roberta Maxwell) to her home. She is shocked by his overt proposition, and he is chagrined to encounter her husband Vatelin (Richard Curnock), who happens to be an old friend. Shock and chagrin are three-quarters of the emotions in a Feydeau farce. Lucienne soon meets Mme. Pontagnac (Tudi Wiggins), and the two make a compact that if either woman is betrayed by her husband, she will make him a cuckold in revenge.

A stock Feydeau device is a shady hotel where the liaisons are to be consummated in a room simultaneously booked to two or three couples. There is inevitably a physical defect that Feydeau manages to make howlingly funny rather than mockingly cruel. This time there is a stone-deaf lady (Helen Burns), who is being taken to Carmen for a treat, after which her medical-officer husband (Tony Van Bridge) intends to mix her a sleeping potion to celebrate the couple's 25th wedding anniversary. There is always a foreign couple (Swedish, in this case) who come in for some sexual kidding, because Feydeau could not hope to get a laugh from a French audience by casting any aspersions on Gallic sexual prowess.

These repetitions breed affectionate hilarity if you are a Feydeau addict. The present cast is stylish and exemplary, and Jean Gascon's direction wisely makes speed triumph over sanity. There's One in Every Marriage is a theatrical bonbon, and it is tres bon.

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