Octave Mirbeau: Two Plays

Richard J. Hand

Description

Octave Mirbeau was one of the most prolific literary figures of France’s storied Belle Époque, and his innovative theatrical works are only recently being rediscovered and appreciated by modern audiences. Here for the first time in English-language translation are his two most celebrated and successful plays: Business is Business, a classical comedy of manners recalling Molière; and Charity, a satirical comedy centered around the exploitation of adolescents in a dubious charity home. In addition to the play texts, this volume also includes an introduction contextualizing the works and the translation and adaptation process.

Introduction: Octave Mirbeau: A biographical sketch

 

Octave Mirbeau: A Theatre Chronology

 

Business is Business, a comedy in three acts

(Les Affaires sont les affaires, 1903)

 

Charity, a comedy in three acts

(Le Foyer, 1908)

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• Theatre
• Performance art
• General officer
• General
• European

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 03 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841506708
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Performance permissions: Anyone wishing to perform either of the plays should contact Richard Hand for his permission at the following address: Prof Richard J. Hand FRSA, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan, The Atrium, 86–88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN, Wales
Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Playtext Series Series editor: Roberta Mock Series ISSN: 1754—0933
Cover designer: Gareth Hughes Copy-editor: MPS India Typesetting: Planman Technologies
ISBN 978–1–84150–486–5
eISBN: 978–1–84150–670–8
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Dedicated to Sadiyah, Shahrazad, Danyazad and Jimahl
Loin de vous Je suis perdu
Contents
Introduction
Octave Mirbeau: A Theatre Chronology
Business Is Business, a comedy in three acts ( Les Affaires sont les affaires, 1903 )
Charity, a comedy in three acts ( Le Foyer, 1908 )
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a small grant in the performing arts to support the research and publication of this volume.
A very special debt of gratitude is owed to Marie-Hélène Grosos for permission to include illustrations by Gus Bofa. Bofa (1883–1968) was a major French cartoonist of the twentieth century, and his drawings for the 1935 French edition of Mirbeau’s plays remain the definitive illustrations of Mirbeau’s theatre. For further details of Bofa’s achievements and more examples of his work, readers are directed to the Bofa website: www.gusbofa.com I would also like to express special thanks to Emmanuel Pollaud-Dulian, custodian of the Bofa website, for his dedication and efficiency in securing the Bofa images.
Sharif Gemie (professor of history at the University of Glamorgan) who proposed this volume and gave invaluable advice and Mirbeau expertise.
Pierre Michel (founding president of the Octave Mirbeau Society and editor of Cahiers Octave Mirbeau ) who greeted this project with such enthusiasm and encouragement.
The late Claude Schumacher (emeritus professor of theatre studies at the University of Glasgow) who offered, as he always did, brilliant advice on the translations and their theatricality.
Laure Humbert (University of Exeter) and Andrea Beaghton (Victor Hugo Society) for reading through the final versions.
Professor Graham Ley (University of Exeter) and Professor Roberta Mock (University of Plymouth) for their constant belief in this project.
Students of drama at the University of Glamorgan who helped to bring early drafts of these translations to life in the studio.
Introduction
Octave Mirbeau: A biographical sketch
Octave Mirbeau was born in Trévières, Normandy, on 16 February 1848. He had a quiet childhood, which seemingly came to an abrupt end when he was sent to a Jesuit college at Vannes in 1859. The next four years were a miserable experience for the young Mirbeau, and the barbarity, tyranny and snobbery he encountered there – which seemed to him a microcosm of French society – would never be far from his writing for the rest of his life. Mirbeau registered to study law at university in 1866 but in 1868 would claim that ‘he had been eating nothing and smoking up to 180 pipes of opium a day’ (Levi, 1992, 437). When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Mirbeau could finally abandon his studies completely and join the army as a lieutenant. In December 1870 he was wounded, and in 1871 he was accused of desertion (he was acquitted of this charge in 1872). Just as his life in the Jesuit college had been traumatic, Mirbeau’s experiences in the army made him develop ‘a passionate loathing for the absurdity of war’ (Levi, 1992, 437). After the Franco-Prussian War, Mirbeau became a journalist specializing in art criticism (he was a pioneering advocate of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin and Vincent Van Gogh) and then theatre reviewing. He established and edited his own satirical journal Les Grimaces in the 1880s. Mirbeau was always a colourful figure and was involved in at least twelve duels in his life, several on account of the provocative opinions expressed in his journalism. The life and work of Mirbeau remain a remarkable reflection of an extraordinary time.
Although primarily a journalist, Mirbeau was a versatile writer producing some significant fiction, including L’Abbé Jules ( Father Jules 1888), and two vitriolic masterpieces of the erotic-grotesque, satires of contemporary France which have never lost the power to shock or provoke universally: Le Jardin des supplices/Torture Garden (1899) and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre/The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900). By no means a prolific playwright, Mirbeau nonetheless wrote six one-act plays (published together as Farces et moralités ( Farces and Morality Plays in 1904) and three full-length plays – one of which, Les affaires sont les affaires/Business Is Business (1903), enjoyed international acclaim and is the work that made Mirbeau, as Pierre Michel (1999, 25) reveals, ‘un millionaire’. In terms of his politics, too, Mirbeau offers an astonishing reflection of a dynamic epoch, moving steadily to the left through his career. Starting as a Bonapartist with anti-Semitic views, he became, by turns, a monarchist and then a republican before becoming, most famously, an anarchist. As an anarchist living through a fascinating and tumultuous epoch of French history, Mirbeau strove to be as provocative and incendiary as he could through his writing. Indeed, despite this radical shift in his political opinions, Mirbeau was always consistent in presenting – in his fiction, plays and journalism – an acerbic critique of what he perceived as the widespread hypocrisy and corruption in French society. Given his shift in political opinions, it is not surprising that the one-time anti-Semite Mirbeau would, like Émile Zola, be outspoken in his support of the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus in the notorious and protracted Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s onwards. Mirbeau developed many important artistic friends in his career, including Camille Pissarro, Stéphane Mallarmé and Anatole France. Compatriots such as Guillaume Apollinaire regarded Mirbeau as ‘the sole prophet of our age’ (Lemarié and Michel, 2011, 1182), and his international standing is reflected in Leon Tolstoy’s assessment that Mirbeau is ‘France’s greatest contemporary writer’ and the pre-eminent example of French culture’s ‘secular genius’ (Lemarié and Michel, 2011, 1181). Afflicted by poor health and demoralized by the horror and futility of the First World War, the once prolific Mirbeau wrote less and less and died on his sixty-ninth birthday in 1917.
Octave Mirbeau: The novelist
Today, Mirbeau’s reputation lies most significantly in the area of fiction. Among his semi-autobiographical novels are Le Calvaire ( Calvary 1886), L’Abbé Jules (1888) and Sébastien Roch (1890), which feature damning assaults on the Church in France, sexual relationships and morality, and the army. Later, Mirbeau would write some ambitiously experimental travel writing such as La 628-E8 (1907) – the title of which is the registration number of Mirbeau’s car – which is a fictionalized account of a journey across the Low Countries and Germany and includes experiential descriptions of the act of motor travelling as well as Mirbeau’s characteristically radical political commentary. However, Mirbeau’s reputation as a novelist persists, most tangibly, with the two novels Le Jardin des supplices/Torture Garden (1899) and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre/The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900).
Torture Garden has been described, according to V. Vale and Andrea Juno, as ‘the most sickening work of art in the nineteenth century’ (quoted in Mirbeau, 1989, 7), and it has lost none of its power to shock or disturb. The novel is predominantly a first-person narrative account of an anonymous man as he makes a journey in the East. The decadent protagonist meets a young English widow Clara on a ship, and she leads him into a taboo world of erotic-grotesquery, culminating in the Chinese torture garden of the title where indigenous criminals are mutilated or executed in horrifically inventive – and meticulously described – ways while the European pleasure-seekers watch. Mirbeau’s narrator sometimes watches aghast, but the thrill of arousal inexorably crawls into him. When the narrator declares in despair, ‘There is nothing real, then, except evil!’ (Mirbeau, 1989, 47), he is not only objectively denouncing the omnipresent forces of sadism and colonialism but also acknowledging the presence of these forces within himself. The institutionalized horror and sadism in the novel make it a forerunner to Franz Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie/In the Penal Colony (1919). Moreover, in its unremittingly disturbing journey into the atrocities and psyche of Western colonialism it is not dissimilar in structure or theme to a contemporaneous work of fiction: Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness (see Hand, 2005, 114–116). Mirbeau’s unstinting focus on sexual depravity and decadence, however, makes Torture Garden the sadistic and sexualized Heart of Darkness of the fin de siècle. ‘The horror, the horror’ pervades Mirbeau’s world as much as Conrad’s, but it is, first and foremost, an explicitly sexual horror.
Published the following year, The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900) also remains an unsettling masterpiece of the erotic and is a devastating critique of bourgeois