Biography Georges Feydeau

Georges Feydeau (1862 – 1921) and "Vaudeville"

Georges Feydeau is the master of a genre called "Vaudeville". Baby's Laxative is his best known play.

Vaudeville is a variant of Boulevard theater, so called because of its distribution in the Theatre of Parisian boulevards (early twentieth century) and its popularity, as opposed to the "noble" theater of the Comédie-Française (French national theatre). This popular theater is now better known since it was host to the Comédie-Française as well as the Molière plays. There is currently a play from Feydeau at the Comédie-Française, Un Fil à la Patte.

Vaudeville inspires cinema and particularly American director Ernst Lubitsch. French director Sacha Guitry was also inspired by Vaudeville. Sacha Guitry was also a close friend of Georges Feydeau.

One of the reasons vaudeville is so popular is because it mocks the bourgeois. The main characters are the big bourgeois of Paris, they are idle and have nothing else to do than deal with their passions and their pleasures.

They are usually flanked with a band of parasites and imposters who are looking to enjoy themselves in their world of luxury and idleness. Among the characters in this upper-class world, we find a privileged wife in an unusual financial situation and divorced from her husband, the "tart" or woman in the process of social ascent because of her marriage, the cuckolded husband and the secret lover hidden in the closet or under the bed.

The themes are first loves, rather than carnal passion and sleeping around (almost all Vaudeville plays deal only around this). There is also the eternal question of money, and above all, social mobility (the promotion to a higher social class or the painful loss of a social status). The bourgeois are ridiculed and this probably explains the great success of the plays.

But this success is mainly due to the perfect technical of Vaudeville, which Baby's Laxative is a brilliant illustration of. It is the success of a fine-tuned comic mechanism, which is repeated from one play to another with minor variations. Everything is fast. The play includes a stutterer, an English lady or a Slavic prince to bring their comical way of talking. Everything ends fine, among the laughter.

French literary tradition remained fairly dismissive towards this theater style acclaimed by the public. It is also the birth of star adoration that prefigures our modern stars: the audience worships the actors because of the large freedom they have in presenting their interpretation.