Farces et moralités is a collection of six comedy plays in one act, written by the French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau

Octave Mirbeau was a French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde...

 and published by Fasquelle in 1904: Vieux ménages (Old couples), L’Épidémie (The Epidemic, Bloomington, University of Denver Press, 1949), Les Amants (The Lovers), Scrupules (Scruples, New York, Samuel French, 1923), Le Portefeuille (The Purse) and Interview.

Commentary

As usual, Mirbeau demystifies and ridicules all that stupid people blindly respect: the law, which is oppressive by nature, and the police, which is arbitrary and repressive by definition; love, a deception, and marriage, a quagmire; wealth, ill-acquired, and social success, a deceptive façade; the newspapers, which anaesthetize people and provide false information, and the politicians, who are quite indifferent to social misery and concerned only with their own emoluments. Its great originality is to extend the challenge to language itself, thanks to which the dominant classes obtain the submission and the respect of the dominated and perpetuate an inegalitarian social order.

Mirbeau succeeds however in making us laugh at that which should really drive us to despair, in the hope that the spark of conscience will help us to live better, to exercise better our liberty of mind, and to rebel against social institutions.

Although placing itself in the continuity of medieval morality play

Morality play

The morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment. In their own time, these plays were known as "interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without a moral theme. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of...

s, which had a pedagogical and moralizing purpose, Mirbeau deliberately chose the mood of farce

Farce

In theatre, a farce is a comedy which aims at entertaining the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,...

, in which exaggeration, acceleration of the rhythm, caricature, plays on words, the grotesque, and the absurd

Absurd

Absurd or The Absurd may refer to:* Absurdity, general and technical usage - associated with extremely poor reasoning, the ridiculous, or nonsense....

 are acceptable and assure the indispensable distancing effect, without any realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

. He anticipates all at once the theater of Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...

, Marcel Aymé

Marcel Aymé

Marcel Aymé was a French novelist, children's writer, humour writer and also a screenwriter and theatre playwright.- Biography :...

, Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...

, and Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, and one of the foremost playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd...

.

External links

Octave Mirbeau, Farces et moralités. Pierre Michel, Foreword. Pierre Michel, « Mirbeau, Ionesco et le théâtre de l’absurde ».