Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear (1907)

A highly respectable, happily married man is embarrassed that his sexual performance has fallen off. Does he confide his distress to his wife? No. He keeps his worry a secret and the secret puts a "flea in her ear," a suspicion that he must be unfaithful to her. This just leads to more and more trouble.

A young nephew moves into the couple's home. His reputation as a sober virginal type gains his uncle's trust and earns him a professional position. On the side, however, he is a licentious regular at the local brothel. Obviously, he keeps his extra-domestic behavior a secret from the uncle who is also his employer.

Secrets fuel the assumptions of the plot. The wife doesn't confront her husband but, with the help of a friend, constructs an elaborate plot to catch him. The friend's handwriting in a false note of passion to the supposed-erring spouse becomes a red rag to her own jealous bull of a husband.

And so on and so on. Everyone keeps a secret. The surface life of the lead characters is all respectability and convention. We meet Chandebise, the CEO of a major insurance company, Finache, the highly regarded physician, Raymonde and Lucienne, the two faithful wives whose friendship makes them conspirators. Under the conventional surface, there is sexually fueled anarchy. The more conventionally rigid the façade, the funnier the explosion of the energies below.

Farce depends on the existence of a conventional society, preferably one that takes itself a bit seriously, is a bit dull and stuffy. Farce is about the keeping of secrets potentially damaging to the individual characters—sexual promiscuity, infidelity, impotence, a birth out-of-wedlock, bastardy, overwhelming debt. The harder the character tries to conceal the secret, the more trouble he or she gets into.

Farce has actually been called a forerunner of surrealism and, if you stop laughing long enough to consider it, there is a dream or nightmare quality to it. Women of good character are encountered in a whore- house (classic male fantasy). People effortlessly exchange identities. Characters drink themselves silly. They mock the exaggerated physical handicaps of others. Stereotypes are wildly inflated. Characters are constantly beating each other or are being beaten. One critic has labeled farce "Punch and Judy for grown ups."

It's one of the oldest formulae in the theatre, dating back to the Romans, who always loved a belly-laugh about illicit sex, mistaken identity, and the come-uppance of arrogance so much better than the weeping and breast-beating of imported Greek tragedies. The hearty Plautus wasn't a big playwright for subtleties, but he sure knew how to convulse the rough crowds who made up much of his audience.

In Roman farce there's always a clever servant who has a deal going on the sly and manipulates his masters like a puppeteer. There's always a mean, low-life character who's a dead ringer look-alike for a character of dignity and position. There's always a husband afraid of being a cuckold and a virtuous woman about to be pushed down the slippery slope.

Farce is a contrast to romantic comedy, which requires an audience with most of its ideals intact. After all, you have to be able to believe—at least for the duration of a romantic play—that the young lovers, united with all obstacles overcome, will remain in love forever. "Happily ever after" is supposed to be real. Farce, on the other hand, demands a more mature, more cynical audience, capable of laughing at love's failures and desire's indiscretions. It's amoral. If the main characters escape with some secrets and some reputation intact, that's good enough.

Farce. Get it right and the audience is howling hysterically. Get it wrong and they yawn. In the last words of the talented and cantankerous actor Sir Donald Wolfit: Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. While the acting is less demanding than in a fine character play, no comedy is more challenging to direct than farce. Timing is everything. Speed is essential. The swift unpacking of box within box, scene within scene, has to move like a well-oiled machine. The form allows no mercy to the slow actor, the stumbler, the line-blower.

Georges Feydeau (1962 - 1921) was the acknowledged master of this meticulously crafted form. Born in Paris when it was the cultural center of the western world, he thrived in the edgy tensions of fin de siecle France, a time that gave the world the Decadent Poets and the Symbolists, the ugliness of the Dreyfus Affair, and the exuberant romanticism of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. After several youthful stage failures, Feydeau married—it would seem for her money--the daughter of Society portrait artist Carolus-Duran, a marriage he would ultimately regret. Between 1890 and 1892 he made a serious study of the great writers of farce, and then in 1892 burst onto the Paris stage with hit after hit after hit. He rapidly became the most popular playwright of the boulevard theatre. His plays were so successful abroad that some were performed in foreign translation before they were produced in French. He lived the high life, kept a table reserved for himself at Maxim's, collected art, gambled heavily, and dressed in sartorial elegance.

The farces that Feydeau engineered with such precision are concerned (as critic Peter Glenville put it) with the appetites and follies of the average human being caught in a net devised by his or her own foolishness. Virtue does not triumph, nor does sentimentality prevail. Every detail is logical and plausible, then pushed to an irrational level.

Like so many clowns in all times and all places, Feydeau was a melancholy man. Trouble haunted him. His marriage failed, he separated from his wife Marianne in 1909 and divorced in 1916. He moved to a hotel. His gambling left him with enormous debts that even his dramatic successes could not cover. In 1918 he contracted syphilis and descended steadily into madness. In 1919 he entered an insane asylum, where he died in 1921. As in Feydeau's great farces, the anarchy within finally conquered the success of the exterior.

© 2007 by Eileen Warburton


RHODE ISLAND COUNCIL FOR THE HUMANITIES

Discussion Sunday at 2nd Story Theatre is made possible through major funding support from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Discussion Sunday do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A man goes to the doctor and says: "Doctor, there's a piece of lettuce sticking out of my bottom." The doctor asks him to drop his trousers and examines him. The man asks, "Is it serious, doctor?" and the doctor replies, "I'm sorry to tell you, but this is just the tip of the iceberg."

Since the 1905 publication of Freud's, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious humor is a decidedly sneaky perversity. Do we laugh less or more, now that we know (thanks to Siggy) how truly naughty we are being in the process? Does Freud deserve a spanking or a love pat? If he played any inspirational role (conscious or unconscious) in Georges Feydeau classic farce, A Flea in her Ear (1907) we may all wish to get in line to deliver him a most appreciative St. Valentine "punishment". But before I put before you the Feydeau case evidence, I wish to offer a brief tutorial in Freudian humorology.

As the preamble joke above illustrates, humor is commonly a playful defiance of taboo. According to Freud, our unconscious abounds with repressed impulses and base drives. It is the work of civility to prohibit awareness of these intolerably aggressive and sexual wishes or fears of annihilation. In so doing, a great amount of psychological energy is invested in maintaining a cap on this wild id. The humor event is a contained and sanctioned transgression, a fleeting moment of pleasurable liberation in which these caged animals see the light of day. Freud frequently referred to the uncanny and the humorous as surprising "returns of the repressed". The iceberg in the above joke is a metaphor for a menacing, submerged, underworld. It looms as an ominous specter of doom, paramount to the sinking of the Titanic. Seeing the tip of this iceberg, we peer at an unsettling "return" of our repressed awareness of mortality. Then in a flash we recall the lettuce and the absurd wordplay liberates us from the grip of fear. As an example of absurd humor, the joke illustrates the role of surprise and freedom from cliché. The joke literally undoes the cliché (boringly predictable) usage of the phrase, "tip of the iceberg". Ticklish delight follows the surprise. We have once again escaped the doctor's bad news and are freer and more alive for having done so. Farce, with its extravagantly improbable plot schemes is generally understood to be a campy species of the anti-cliché, a precursor to the "theatre of the absurd".

Enter Georges Feydeau. Slamming the door behind himself. (After all, he, like us all, has an unconscious to keep repressed). In fact, in A Flea in her Ear there are nearly 300 entrances and exits creating the farcical signature ambience of madcap mayhem. The repeatedly slamming door beats the pulse of our flirtation with opening the closet and then slamming it shut. This duality of open and closed, seen and hidden is echoed throughout the play by numerous doublings. At the outset, we learn of the double lives of Monsieur Chandebise and his wife Raymonde. Suffering from a sudden case of inexplicable impotence, Chandebise seeks medical attention. Doctor Finache offers the dubious solution of orthopedic suspenders to help him get it up. In the meantime Raymonde, has been listening to the annoying suggestion of a "flea in her ear" (an irrepressible idea of jealousy that is likely a projection of her own infidelity). She suspects Chandebise of having an affair and sets a trap to catch him with his pants down. Innumerable Jack-in-the-Box surprise entrances, exposures and attempts at concealment, suggest the reckless flitting of a restless flea that is not just in Raymonde's head, but also in the very mechanics of the plot. To make matters worse, attempts to undo the confusion are frustrated at every turn by a series of over-the-top failures of communication served up from a randy nephew with a speech impediment, a lisping conquistador in constant fear of cuckoldry, and a lewd incomprehensible German. To round-off the cast, there is the meddling princess-friend, a bungling womanizer, a screeching old coot, a has-been 'ho, a romping maid, a sniveling butler, and finally, a whining butt-kicking bully and his slaphappy imbecile invoking what Jung would probably have called the Moe-Larry-Curly Archetype. There are costume sight gags, a spinning bed, and an itchy pistol - all eagerly situated at the hotel "The Swaggering Cock". If this were not enough, Chandebise's "double life" as an indulger of a secret fantasy of a secret admirer, who is really his wife's friend who is pretending to be his wife, who in turn is pretending to be the secret admire comes to an uncanny twist when he encounters his doppelganger, the imbecilic Poche - whose most notable job is to carry the double entendre of "getting the wood up" (an uncanny return of Chandebise's sexual infirmity that got the whole farce started in the first place). Do any taboos survive unscathed?

Farce excels in displaying our absurd attempts to conceal our vulnerabilities. In the staged characters we see extreme puppet-like reflections of ourselves, the strings of our unconscious, and our humorously vain efforts to flee humiliation. We catch a glimpse of us ironically undoing the very dignity that our ever-escalating schemes attempt to persevere. Could it be that "falling in love" makes us all loose our footing on dignity's ledge as well? Love, after all, makes us vulnerable and that's the set up of a good joke.

© 2007 by Rendueles Villalba

This essay was prepared as a companion piece to Shrink Rap, which will take place immediately following the performance on Saturday, February 17.

Ed Shea and local psychiatrist Rendueles Villalba, MD lead informal, post-show discussions to examine the play from the psychological perspective. Ed and Rendueles will often host one specialist whose field is germane to the discussion of the play. Shrink Rap is included in the price of admission.