Georges Feydeau

THE DEATH OF VAUDEVILLE AND MELODRAMA

What a joke! Vaudeville is dead! Melodrama is dead! Really! Would you join the ideas of that little group of young authors who have found no better way to kill these two flourishing genres that bother them than simply to declare them dead? But think about it, my dear friends: if they were truly dead, would it be necessary to make such an effort and raise such a commotion about it? When something no longer exists, do we feel such a need to talk about it? Finally, if vaudeville and melodrama were dead, would they be performed four or five hundred times in succession, while a comedy of the so-called superior genre (as though there were a classification of genres!) achieves equal success barely a hundred times? How are we to explain such an advantage enjoyed by a dead genre? Perhaps with the saying: “When something is dead, it is good for something else”? In that case, long live death!

No. The truth is that there are vaudevilles and vaudevilles, melodramas and melodramas, just as there are comedies and comedies. When a vaudeville is well constructed, when it has logic—logic above all—is well connected, contains observations, when its characters are not merely puppets, when the plot is interesting and the situations amusing, then it succeeds. The same is true of melodrama: look at The Two Children, look at The Troubled Waters: what do these plays owe their success to? To the fact that they are good melodramas, especially the first one.

What I particularly reproach the attackers of vaudeville and melodrama for is the maliciousness of the campaign they have undertaken. When a vaudeville or a melodrama fails, listen to them shouting as they go: “There you are, you see that vaudeville is dead! I told you that melodrama was finished!” But why do they suddenly fall silent when a vaudeville or melodrama succeeds? Damn it, what about being fair-minded opponents! Shall we take advantage of the failure of this or that comedy—and they fail often enough—to announce that comedy is dead? Come now! We would be far too afraid of being considered imbeciles; do you, then, care less about public opinion than we do?

What, then, are we to say about those arrogant people, bursting with the superiority they attribute to themselves, who declare with utter contempt that vaudeville and melodrama “are neither literature nor theatre”? “They are not literature”—very well! Since literature is the antithesis of theatre: theatre is a picture of life, and in life people do not speak literarily; therefore, simply making your characters speak literarily is enough to deprive them of vitality and make them unreal. But “they are not theatre”—wait a minute! It is not enough, gentlemen, for you to decide that this is so for it actually to be so. Theatre is, above all, the development of action, and action is the foundation of vaudeville and melodrama. I know that today there is a tendency to turn theatre into a platform for speeches; but the moment it becomes a platform for speeches, theatre is no longer theatre.

Besides, what is the point of arguing? It is well known that everything done in theatre which those gentlemen do not do is not theatre at all. “There is no spirit outside ourselves and our friends!” All of this, as our Capi used to say, is of no importance whatsoever. There are eternal things, such as genres that happen to be fashionable, which envious people try to undermine, but which suffer not at all because of it. For the dogs bark, and the caravan passes on.

Only, I admit that, despite everything, I would like to have proof that all those attackers are truly sincere when they look down upon vaudeville and melodrama with such contempt. I would like each of them, before returning to the superior genre he champions, to feel obliged to write three good acts of a vaudeville or melodrama, so that it might be established that, if he does not do so again in the future, it is only because he does not wish to, because the genre is truly beneath his level. Then I would be convinced. But until then, I cannot help repeating the verse of the good La Fontaine: “They are too green,” he says, “and quite good enough for peasants.”

(1905)

Translated from the French
Marina Orlović