It’s #FarcesFriday! This week our Farces’ director searches the internet for productions of Pathelin, to see how widely it has travelled and how many different ways the play has been performed.

I have a very strict rule about not watching productions of a play I’m working on- I don’t want my own ideas about it, and that of my collaborators, to get hung up by someone else’s concepts. Sometimes, once you’ve seen something, as the saying goes you can’t unsee it. But I’m still curious, and being so far down our farces rabbit hole, I decided it was okay to be at least a little bit nosy, so I started looking up Master Pierre Pathelin online. What kind of online presence did the play have?

In terms of images, book covers from various editions are what come up the most frequently, but a dive into Wikimedia Commons, of all places, yielded rather more interesting fruit. (I’m pinning these to a new Pinterest board, if you’re curious to see them.) The woodcut prints which accompany some editions of the text are the most frequent images that aren’t a volume cover. They portray moments such as Pierre talking to his wife Guillemette, “buying” cloth from Guillaume, and the trial scene before the Judge- in short, the major scenes from the play. There are a couple sketches of Victorian actors portraying some of the characters, which look as if they may have been intended for publication, perhaps in a magazine or newspaper devoted to the theatre, as well as an advertising cartoon for the same production. There are photos from a late Victorian production which remind one that the lines between melodrama, pantomime, and farce are blurry. Available for perusal, too, is the music and libretto for an operatic version of the play (as well as photographs which suggest it was translated and staged in other languages, outside of France). Pathelin, this tells us, didn’t just spawn sequels, but adaptation into other art forms as well.

As a beloved- and easy-to-stage- piece of French dramatic history, it’s not surprising to find Pathelin well represented on YouTube. You can watch primary school-aged children enacting scenes, which surprised me as I would have thought the comedy was a little bit more sophisticated than the average nine- or ten-year old would enjoy. High school drama groups also perform it, as do the more expected university students and professional companies. There’s one version where a family decided to have some fun with their video camera and record themselves doing scenes from the play in their own home! The majority of the online videos show performances in French, including performances from classes who are learning French as a second language. And not all those which are linguistically French are nationally French: the National Theatre of Senegal has performed Pathelin and put it online. I found at least one iteration in Portuguese, as well as a black-and-white film version, professionally made in 1961, translated into Danish, and another iteration which, while possibly still performed in French, was presented in what was then known as Yugoslavia. 

What is the takeaway from this online Pathelin blitz? Well, first, it’s simply evidence that those who know the play have always found it entirely entertaining and worth staging; it’s not simply a medieval relic known only to footnote-grubbing academics, it’s a play that has been performed, at least occasionally, across many centuries and in many countries. It’s also far better known to the French than the English, which is fair- the original is in their language- but also a bit of a shame, because there is nothing about the play that is so specific, culturally or linguistically, that it can’t be enjoyed equally in translation. (This is why it still felt right for us at HIDden- it’s a historic drama that in our wider culture isn’t especially well known, though it has every right to be!) And, indeed, the variety of countries where it appears in even these limited records indicate that its basic ideas and humour transcend borders and cultural differences.

Another interesting observation is that, if we may go by the costumes, it’s almost always staged very clearly as medieval. (The interesting exception is one illustration that places the characters in Georgian dress. Dating from the mid nineteenth century, their choice is unusual in terms of choosing to present a historical version of Pathelin, but one set in a different time than its origins.) What I find curious about this adherence to medieval dress is that the play isn’t socompletely grounded in medieval circumstances that it must be medieval to make sense. YouTube is, of course, a limited sample, and I feel very confident in assuming that there have been “modern dress” Pathelins, with the lawyers in suits and carrying briefcases. But it doesn’t seem to be a particularly common choice. Contrast this with productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which have probably spent more time out of their own period than in. Why do some plays get locked into a particular time period while others, with no more or less internal requirement for being period-specific, don’t? I don’t actually know! But I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Even the limited data set which is this brief internet search speaks to the durability of the play. Across centuries, languages, and borders, the tale of a trickster lawyer and the people who try to cheat him in turn is universally appealing. Do other cultures have lawyer jokes? Pathelin’s popularity says yes! The next question is why, when it’s made it to such diverse places as Denmark and Yugoslavia, it’s still relatively unknown in the UK. This is indeed a mystery. At least we can hope that, by the middle of May, at least a few more people in York will have “met” this delightful text (along with its far more obscure but equally funny farce sibling, The Washtub) and joined the many who, around the world and across the years, have found delight in the antics of Pierre and his fellows!