Once Bitten

Synopsis

There is a lawyer, his pretty wife, his mother in law, an impecunious uncle who falls asleep whenever he sits down, a hopeless maid, the lawyer’s lawyer friend and a disgruntled cook. And then there is suddenly his first brief - a divorce. So there is now also the woman who wants a divorce but no scandal and her husband who wants no divorce. And then there are, of course, the mistresses – and one has a dog. And all this has something to do with the Veauradieux case and missing jewellery. So now there are the police too!

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 22 December 2010

Every bit as funny as A Flea in Her Ear at the Old Vic, you can see exactly where Feydeau got his ideas from in this wonderful re-discovery of an 1875 French farce by Alfred Hennequin (with Alfred Delacour), father of one of Feydeau’s subsequent collaborators.

As if in Feydeau, the bourgeois cast list of lawyers, plaintiffs and adulterers remove to a Parisian hot-spot on the Rue Saint-Lazare before unravelling the consequences next morning back in the lead lawyer’s study. And, also as in Feydeau, there’s someone with a speech impediment – in this case a lawyer who has to pretend (don’t ask) that he has a paralysed tongue.

In a fantastically complicated plot, three characters are bitten savagely on the wrist by a snappy offstage dog who features – dead as a dodo – in the last act as a woolly decoy. The dog belongs to Beth Cordingly’s soignée mistress, squashed in her muff in a chance encounter on the bus; when her husband looms inconveniently from Eng...

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