Il teatro comico di Eugène Labiche I

«For forty years Eugène Labiche made his contemporaries laugh: he was a force, a beneficial force. Joy is in fact the dominant feature of all his theatre, and this is what makes it a unique and very original theatre. Other authors, in their respective eras, proved to be as joyful as Labiche, but none, like him, possessed that inexhaustible joy which, from the beginning to the end of his work, proved to be his constant source of inspiration. It is Labiche himself who seems to have composed his plays with the sole purpose of amusing himself and entertaining the audience.

The environment in which Labiche’s spirit of observation, so penetrating, flows is always the same, and the character he constantly stages is the bourgeois, close relative of Monsieur Prudhomme drawn by Henry Monnier. He is rich, this bourgeois, or at least well-off, because wealth is a perfect soil for cultivating the flower of stupidity. He is a man who has lived, this bourgeois, but who has learned nothing from life: his few experiences inevitably turn into aphorisms or formulas without meaning. He is a sententious type, full of prejudices, capable of recognizing morality only when it is perched on stilts on which he himself has placed it. Limited and with a narrow view of life, he reveals himself to be petty even in vices: as a young man he was a libertine, yes, but only to a certain extent. Once married, he will enter completely into his character, and will consciously suffer the misadventures anticipated by the situation.

All this is the fruit of an authentic spirit of observation; is it possible that, despite the clownish appearances, it is instead a pessimistic observation? Absolutely not. Because if Labiche hurries to laugh at our faults, it is because he has no intention of crying over them. He accepts things as they are, because he considers them acceptable and because, after all, there is no remedy. That’s why, despite all his faults, his bourgeois is a very good person, not so bad but surely fierce».

(René Doumic, De Scribe à Ibsen: causeries sur le théâtre contemporain, 1893)

The book also contains a close examination of the author’s theatrical style, of the characters in his texts and a list of all his works.
(edited by Annamaria Martinolli. The book is in Italian language)