Marcel Achard

Marcel Achard (5 July 1899 – 4 September 1974) was a French playwright and screenwriter whose popular sentimental comedies

Themes and variations within a philosophical outlook

A native of the

Marcel Achard wrote his first play in 1922 and had a major success the following year when renowned actor-director Charles Dullin staged his play Voulez-vous jouer avec moâ? [Would You Like to Play with Me?], a sensitively delicate comedy about circus and its clowns, casting the playwright in a small part, as one of the clowns. The production set a pattern for the remainder of his theatrical output, most of which can be considered as 20th century reworkings of stock characters and situations from the Italian traditional Commedia dell'arte. The personages of Pierrot and Columbine are transported into modern-day settings and inserted into an occasionally mawkish or nostalgic love plot with equal doses of laughter mingled with pain and regret.

These themes were expanded upon in two of his most popular plays of the period—1929's Jean de la Lune [John of the Moon a/k/a The Dreamer] and 1932's Domino. Jean showed how the unwavering trust of Jef, the faithful Pierrot prototype, transforms his scandalously adulterous wife into his idealized image of her, while Domino presented another unfaithful wife who pays a gigolo to make a pretense of courting her so as to distract her husband from her real lover, but the gigolo manages to act his character with such pretend sincerity that she winds up falling in love with this fictional persona.

The distinctive quality of Achard's plays was their dreamlike mood of sentimental melancholy, underscored by the very titles which were primarily taken from popular bittersweet songs of the day. 1924's Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre [

Career peak in the interwar period

Achard's greatest successes and popularity were in the period between the two World Wars when contemporary critics favorably compared him to some of his renowned French predecessors such as Pierre de Marivaux and Alfred de Musset. Postwar pundits were not as kind, pointing out the rather narrow scope of human psyche that he represented and deprecatingly referring to him as a "spécialiste de l'amour" ["love specialist"] for the sickly-sweet characteristics of his poetic imagination.

The critics focused, of course, on Achard's most popular plays, disregarding the fact that the reason Achard continued to write them is precisely because they met with such unvarying success. His less-well known works, however, show innovative techniques and original themes. 1929's La Belle Marinière^[1] [The Beautiful Lady of the Canals a/k/a The Beautiful Bargewoman] still has some of the excessively-poetic dialogue, but is overall a realistic play about a love triangle involving a bargeman, his wife and his best friend and companion. Similarly, 1933's La femme en blanc [The Woman in White] uses a then-new technique of recreating for the audience events as they are being described by the play's characters. In 1938's Le corsaire [The Privateer], a "play-in-a-play" device, pioneered by Luigi Pirandello, depicts film actors portraying the life of a long-ago pirate, finding themselves caught in an endless loop of similarities. The same year saw the production of his most controversial play, Adam, which strove to give insight into the conflicted emotions of an unhappy homosexual. Although the very subject matter caused it to be considered scandalous at the time, its brief revival three decades later, in the open and radicalized culture of the late 1960s, when the author was approaching his 70th birthday, found the once-ahead-of-its-time work judged as a tame and dated period piece below Achard's usual literary standard.

Successful postwar plays

After World War II, despite the criticism, Achard's literary output continued unabated. Among his most successful later plays were 1952's Les compagnons de la Marjolaine [The Companions of Marjoram] and 1955's Le mal d'amour [Love Sickness]. The greatest popularity, however, was achieved by a 1957 comedy about a testy, ill-tempered character nicknamed Patate [Spud] and a 1962 comic mystery L'Idiote [The Idiot], best known in America as the basis for the play and film A Shot in the Dark.

Four of Achard's plays also had