Eugène Labiche

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Eugène Labiche
Cimetière de Montmartre
GenreDramaturgy
Notable worksThe Italian Straw Hat
French and Francophone literature
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Eugène Marin Labiche (6 May 1815 – 22 January 1888) was a French

dramatist. He remains famous for his contribution to the vaudeville genre and his passionate and domestic pochads
.

In the 1860s, he reached his peak with a series of successes including Le Voyage de M. Perrichon (1860), La Poudre aux yeux (1861), La Station Champbaudet (1862) and La Cagnotte (1864). He worked with Jacques Offenbach, then director of the Bouffes-Parisiens, to write librettos for operettas and for several comic operas.

His 1851 farce The Italian Straw Hat, written with Marc-Michel, has been adapted many times to stage and screen.

Early life

He was born into a

bourgeois family and studied law.[1] At the age of twenty, he contributed a short story to Chérubin magazine, entitled "Les plus belles sont les plus fausses" ("The most beautiful are the most fake/false"). A few others followed, but failed to catch the attention of the public.[2]

Career

Labiche tried his hand at dramatic criticism in the Revue des théâtres and in 1838, wrote and premiered two plays. The small Théâtre du Pantheon produced, to some popular success, his drama L'Avocat Loubet, while a

vaudeville, Monsieur de Coyllin, ou l'homme infiniment poli (written in collaboration with Marc-Michel and performed at the Palais Royal) introduced a provincial actor who was to become and to remain a great Parisian favourite, the famous comedian Grassot.[3]

Statue in Souvigny-en-Sologne, France

In the same year, Labiche, still doubtful about his true vocation, published a romance called La Clé des champs. According to Léon Halévy, Labiche's publisher went bankrupt soon after the novel was out: "A lucky misadventure, for this timely warning of Destiny sent him back to the stage, where a career of success was awaiting him." There was yet another obstacle in the way. When he married, Labiche solemnly promised his wife's parents that he would renounce a profession then considered incompatible with moral regularity and domestic happiness. A year later, his wife released him from his vow, and Labiche recalled the incident when he dedicated the first edition of his complete works to her.[3]

In conjunction with

imbroglio
-style play, in which someone is in search of something, but does not find it till five minutes before the curtain falls. For the next twenty-five years, he continued to write successful comedies and vaudevilles, all basically constructed on the same plan and containing a dose of comic observation and good sense. "Of all the subjects," he said, "which offered themselves to me, I have selected the bourgeois. Essentially mediocre in his vices and in his virtues, he stands half-way between the hero and the scoundrel, between the saint and the profligate."[3]

During the second period of his career Labiche collaborated with Alfred Delacour, Adolphe Choler, and others. Emile Augier said: "The distinctive qualities which secured a lasting vogue for the plays of Labiche are to be found in all the comedies written by him with different collaborators, and are conspicuously absent from those which they wrote without him." Even more important was his professional relationship with actor Jean Marie Geoffroy, who specialized in Labiche's pompous and fussy bourgeois characters. Many of Labiche's roles were written specifically for Geoffroy. Célimare le bien-aimé (1863), Le Voyage de M. Perrichon (1860), La Grammaire, Un Pied dans le crime, La Cagnotte (1864), were some of Labiche's most important plays.[3]

Retirement and death

In 1877, he ended his connection with the stage, and retired to his rural property in Sologne. There, he devoted his energies to supervising agricultural work and to reclaiming land and marshes. His lifelong friend,

Académie française in 1880.[3]

Labiche died in Paris and was buried in the

Cimetière de Montmartre
.

Appreciation

Some admirers have considered Labiche the equal of Molière; his plays are more complex and less coarse than many other examples of French farce. Love is practically absent from his theatre. In none of his plays did he ever venture into the depths of feminine psychology, and womankind is only represented by pretentious old maids and silly young ladies. He ridiculed marriage, but in a friendly and good-natured manner that always left a door open to repentance and timely amendment.[3]

Plays

Filmography

References

  1. ISBN 978-1-85459-300-9
    . Retrieved 31 May 2017.
  2. ^ Filon 1911, pp. 4–5.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Filon 1911, p. 5.

External links

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