Madness, impotence, adultery, prostitution, alcoholism, and sadomasochism are all ingredients for a light comedy in the hands of Georges Feydeau.
Interestingly, it was in the mid-60s that Flea, now the most popular Feydeau play among language audiences, first reached those audiences in a major way. In 1966, Great Britain’s National Theatre presented Flea in a translation by British author John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey), starring Albert Finney and directed by Jacques Charon of the Comedie-Francaise. The production delighted audiences with its risque sex-farce humor and madcap plot of mistaken identities; in 1968, Charon and Noel Coward collaborated on a film version starring Rex Harrison. But those productions were set in the time Feydeau intended–Paris in the early 1900s. Though Mortimer’s adaptation sought contemporary British equivalents for Feydeau’s slang, Galati’s script is, as far as Maggio knows, the first attempt to update the plays action.
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“Beatty created a building which had the architectural features of the time the play was written and then furnished it with 60s stuff,” Maggio says. “It becomes a wonderful metaphor for what we’ve done with the play: the foundations are the same, but we’ve refurnished it.”
