It’s our final #FarcesFriday because the event is this Saturday night! (You can still get tickets, or get them at the door!) So today our farces’ director sums up the experience of preparing for them.

It’s so hard to believe we’ve arrived at the time when the farces will be performed, and put to bed, at least for now. They’ve been quite a journey, from an idea just being thrown around, through an incredible amount of preparation, to tomorrow evening!

The farces started even more embryonic than most of our productions, because I had no real familiarity with either French medieval drama or comedy in general in a historic context. We knew we wanted to start moving outside of the English medieval niche, but not going too far: something with a small cast, at a small scale, seemed a good way to get back on the metaphorical horse. Going through my bookshelves and pulling one of Jody Enders’ volumes off the shelf, I realised what a treasure-trove existed in French farces, and they ticked all the boxes: small casts, short skits, comedy, and not a deity in sight. 

Once we had settled on farces in general, and chosen our pair in particular, the academic excavation began. I liked these plays, but what did we know about them that might change how we approached them? There’s an irony in there somewhere, because these are not deep, intellectual plays that require a heavy academic hand; they’re pieces of fun and fluff, largely, pure entertainment for its own sake.

And yet working on these plays, I have learned so much, which I have hopefully distilled into smaller bites to share with you in these weekly posts! French medieval theatre is so remarkably different from English, more than I would have expected. I have still not ascertained why there doesn’t seem to be any visible exchange across the Atlantic, at a time when the two countries were interacting quite a lot (albeit not necessarily very pleasantly), or why culturally the French valued humour, and secular humour at that, in a way that doesn’t quite seem to have been the case in England.

It was dismaying to read through many farces, only to discover how violent they were. Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did- it was so prevalent that I rather struggled to find plays where that wasn’t a dominant feature. Violence often features in English plays, as well, but not so relentlessly. I think it’s still possible to perform those plays if they’re handled very delicately, but it isn’t something I personally wanted to do, so we moved on and kept digging to find the plays that we have, which are also, in my opinion, two of the best anyway. And that’s another thing worth noting about medieval French farces: with so many of them surviving, their quality is uneven, and not all of them are necessarily worth performing today. (Just because it’s old doesn’t always mean it’s good is sometimes a hard thing for a history lover to say! But it remains true.)

Women came off as poorly as you might expect from something written in the 14th century, and yet we have Guillemette, who accurately points out her husband Pierre Pathelin’s flaws, but who seems to have a marriage largely based on mutual aims and a degree of respect. Jacquinot and Jacquinette, our Washtub couple, could learn some lessons from them. And it could be argued that for them, as well as marriages in other farces, nobody comes out ahead- the women may be stereotyped as cranky nags or adulteresses, but the men are often stereotyped as lumpen idiots, who deserve what they get. It’s a negative egalitarianism, but it’s arguably present.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the farces writ large is that very nearly everyone is a bit scandalous- the moral universe of the farces is indeed a perverse one, where everyone is cheating, failing, or flailing. True success and decency just don’t exist here; moral ambiguity is as good as it gets. But perhaps that’s one of the attractive things about them: even as stereotypical, stock characters, the better among the farces know that their characters can’t simply be hateful or saintly, we have to sympathise with their plights even when they handle them badly, because they’re only funny if there is just enough humanity in them to be recognisable. In its way, this comes closer to modern characters, with motivations and nuances, than some of the more reverent religious dramas.

One of things we haven’t learned yet, but hope to this weekend, is how well they stand up as text. Many of the farces really do need a lot of zany, antic staging to make sense. We suspect, and hope, that the two we’ve chosen have enough narrative heft within the dialogue to prove entertaining. I don’t think you need to lard lots of extra sight gags on to them, and in fact I think you may detract from the core of these plays and their characters if you go overboard on staging jokes. We’ll see if this is the right approach or not when we get the plays in the mouths of actors this weekend!

I’m so excited to see what people will do with these wonderful characters! They may not be as deeply written a something out of a modern drama, but they’re fun and they’re funny and they’re sympathetic in their own strange way. While I don’t believe that all stories or characters need to be “relatable” there is something quite charming about realising that some things don’t change. Spouses still bicker over petty things like laundry. Lawyers still have shady reputations- maybe sometimes with good reason! People still try to see what they can get away with on a regular basis, flattery can still be pretty successful in running a scheme and a cheat, in-laws can still stick their noses in and make things awkward. All of this could have been written last week and have been just as amusing.

I’ll miss the farces. I won’t miss wrestling through my limited, struggling French… but I can read a lot more of it than I could a year ago! I’ll miss working on plays that make me laugh more than, despite evidence to the contrary, they make me think. They have been a bit of a vacation into a celebration of laughter and the ridiculous, which is not a place where I spent much time, and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Maybe someday we’ll come back and revisit a more fully staged version, but until that happens, it is indeed a bit sad to say au revoir to the Pathelins and the Jacquinots. But I want to bring this in with a smile… so I think I’ll go read the plays again once more. Then I’ll be sure to end this with a laugh.