La Puce à l'oreille ・ Comédie-Française

In 2019, for her fifth production at the Comédie-Française, Lilo Baur offered her brilliant take on "La Puce à l’oreille" ("A Flea in Her Ear"), an extravagant 1907 play by Feydeau that marked the author’s triumphant return to writing vaudevilles

It contains all the ingredients that make him the vaudeville master: burlesque situations and overlapping cases of mistaken identities, with the theme of the lookalike thrown in for good measure. With its impressive construction and remarkable inventiveness, it is akin to “a fireworks display set off over an anthill” as critics described it back then. The primary source of the confusion that prevails throughout the play is a package opened “by mistake” by Mr Chandebise’s wife, Raymonde: it contains suspenders sent from the Minet-Galant hotel. Miffed, she is sure her husband is being unfaithful. She asks her friend Lucienne to write a letter to invite her husband to a rendezvous in the same hotel. The accomplice’s plan goes terribly wrong, as her own husband stumbles upon her letter and becomes convinced he is being cheated on too... All the characters end up at Le Minet-Galant where the hotel porter, Poche, is a dead ringer for Raymonde’s husband.
La Puce à l’oreille is a quintessential troupe play, taking the ingenious use of stage resources to new limits with an “emergency staircase” and, most notably, a stratagem to make adulterous couples disappear at the slightest alert. The play will be performed on tour in early 2024, after this year’s in-house performances.

This show premiered on September 21, 2019 at the Salle Richelieu.

ON TOUR
FRANCE
JAN > MAR

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