Comedy
My research has not taught me much – but one important thing, this play has not had the honor of your translations and staging.
For you, it seems as if it doesn’t exist – and so it becomes a novelty, which is quite extravagant for a text dating from the French 17th century.
I’m moving forward in time while staying in my theme: the setbacks with justice.
With enough plays and maybe circus performances as well – there will surely be something to imagine around that.
Since it’s a real comedy, everyone gets a kick out of it.
The judge, who has become crazy by dint of judging and who has fallen into the loop: judging, judging, judging, anything but judging, well, madam!
His family is horrified, impossible to let him go out in this state, you would swear an enraged judge, it is not at all suitable.
Litigators, who plead for the sake of pleading, who live only for that – to quibble with others, to get out his little ruling, his little line lost in a code forgotten by the world, and to win win win, no matter how high the price of the adventure – and it is high, winning the case is so important for the litigator.
While the old fools, in the judge’s living room, are trying to throw lawsuits in each other’s faces, of course a love story is born, between the young people who are not yet crazy.
And here is that to occupy all these old croutons, judge and litigators, and that they stop taking care of their children, it was necessary to give them a beautiful lawsuit to be regulated. It will be that of the dog who dared – the beggar – to steal a capon. A complete capon. And it seems that he also ate the capon. A feat that will put the old people in ecstasy…
As it is a comedy, it ends badly for the old fools and well for the young lovers – still – and especially the spectator did not forget to laugh to the tears by seeing all these fools splitting up with their penal code, their articles, their aliases, their “res judicata”, and all the infernal company which sits in the courts.
It has two other advantages, which I think are important for a play to stage in our time.
As it has been little performed and almost not translated, the text will be more easily adaptable to our contemporary language & – as it deals with ageless problems, it is so possible not to play it in period costumes.
So, with ? almost nothing, it takes a real modernity and a real place on our stages. Aren’t these advantages important?
In addition, this comedy is not political – it’s pure comedy, just for fun.
The political comedy about justice we owe to Aristophanes – the play is called The Wasps and I’ll tell you about it too, one day or another. It’s harder to take in the nose, it’s true.
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