La Folle de Chaillot
La Folle de Chaillot ( The madwoman of Chaillot , also The Mad of Chaillot ) is a satirical play by the French diplomat and writer Jean Giraudoux .
Emergence
After the war began, Giraudoux was appointed Commissaire général à l'Information , a kind of propaganda minister; However, after the German attack, the blitz allemand , in May 1940 and the establishment of the Pétain regime in June, he withdrew more and more into private life. In the relative normality that prevailed in France from autumn 1940 to around the end of 1943 - despite the German occupation - he published a collection of lectures and essays and wrote other pieces, including La Folle de Chaillot , in 1943 as the last work before his unexplained sudden one Composed death.
shape
The piece consists of two acts and follows the classic Aristotelian unity of time, space and action. It is set in one day in the Paris suburb of Chaillot at the beginning of the 20th century .
action
The first act takes place on the terrace of the little café “Chez Francis” near the Seine . A group of unscrupulous business people (the influential "President", a "Baron", a "Stockbroker" and a " Prospector " on many boards ) are looking for money and oil. The businessmen want to set up a joint-stock company and partially blow up Paris, as they suspect oil deposits under the city and which they want to develop. History and culture are worthless to them and only stand in the way of profit.
They are waiting for the young Pierre they have blackmailed, who is supposed to carry out a bomb attack on the house of the state engineer because he refuses all prospecting excavations in Paris. Pierre gets scruples at the last moment, desperate in his dilemma and wants to commit suicide, but is saved from it by the knockout blow of a rescuer and passed out to the nearby café of all places. There the dishwasher Irma falls in love with him.
The adorable-ridiculously eccentric Aurélie, already older, is in the café, because she's just about to pick up leftovers there. The other poor, the dishwasher Irma, a philosophizing rag collector, an experienced sewer cleaner, the waiter and Piccolo , a flower girl, a street singer and a shoelace seller, even the district policeman, adore her as "Countess". The "crazy Countess" convinced the desperate Pierre of the beauty of life and gave him new courage. After Pierre had told her about the speculators' plans, she decided to thwart their plans.
In the second act, the “madman” hatches a ruse with her similarly quirky friends Constance, Gabrielle and Joséphine (the “madmen” of Passy , St-Sulpice de Paris and La Concorde ) and the poor. In a provisional court hearing, they first sentence the businessmen and their helpers to death. Aurélie now invites the criminals to her apartment in the basement, lured under the pretext that the water there tastes of oil. A staircase leads down from the apartment to the sewers below Paris, from which those who are unfamiliar with the area can no longer find their way. No sooner are the speculators and representatives of the sensational press down the stairs than the “madman” locks the door behind them forever and thus executes the judgment.
To make the happy ending perfect, Aurélie also ensures that Irma and Pierre find each other in love. She herself was once too timid and so had given up the chance of love happiness. She militantly declares that she will face all future attacks on humanity.
interpretation
The play is a bitter and melancholy satire on the goings-on of speculators and traders during the German occupation in Paris. The supposedly based on reality and reason materialistic capitalism and supposedly progressive zeitgeist (president, baron, broker and prospector represent entrepreneurs, the financial world, (money) nobility as well as progress and modern technology as a whole) is what is really insane. The insane, embodied by the eccentric girlfriends, are in truth those with common sense, have retained their energy, love of freedom and humanity through their armor. You and the poor and artists, embodied by the rag picker, the flower girl, the street singer, etc., are also the only ones
Giraudoux packs this key statement in the form of a poetically wrapped modern fairy tale : The bad guys all receive their just punishment, joie de vivre and shrewdness defeat powerful materialism, lovers find each other.
Performances and arrangements
During the German occupation of France, Giraudoux's dramas were not allowed to be performed. The play was only premiered posthumously on December 19, 1945 in the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris by Louis Jouvet after his return from America. The German-language premiere was in June 1946 at the Schauspielhaus Zurich . It has seen numerous revisions and adaptations and is one of the best-known plays by Giraudoux, which were often performed in German-speaking countries until the 1960s. Today it is rarely seen on German stages, the last time in 2017 in Munich in the theater Much Ado About Nothing
It was filmed in 1969, following the Broadway musical adaptation by Maurice Valency , based on the script by Edward Anhalt and directed by Bryan Forbes , with Katharine Hepburn in the lead role and other prominent actors (English original title: The Madwoman of Chaillot ). It was also edited as the musical Dear World in 1969. A production as a ballet with the music of Rodion Chtchedrin took place in 1992 in Paris in the Espace Cardin.
expenditure
- La folle de Chaillot . Paris: Grasset 1946.
- German translation
- No war in Troy. The madwoman of Chaillot . Translated into German by Annette Kolb and WM Treichlinger . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1959. (Fischer paperback.)
- The madwoman of Chaillot . Piece in two acts. Translated by Wilhelm M. Treichlinger. Stuttgart: Reclam 1980. ISBN 3-15009979-X
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jutta Czeguhn: The theater "Much Ado About Nothing" brings Jean Giraudoux 'seldom played and yet timeless play "Die Irre von Chaillot" to the stage Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 28, 2017, accessed on September 17, 2018