The Theatrics of Triangular Trysts, or Variations on a Form: Labiche, Vitrac, Beckett

The Theatrics of Triangular Trysts, or Variations on a Form: Labiche, Vitrac, Beckett JUDITH G. MILLER "Two's company. Three's a crowd!" As children we sling about that isolationist dictum meant to exclude an irksome third party from the bliss of coupledom. Sigmund Freud explains the libidinal whyfor: "Sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can be superfluous or disturbing." And yet, he warns: "Civilization [here we should perhaps read 'bourgeois society'] depends on relationships between a considerable number ofindividuals!"I We human beings, then, are condemned to live a paradox. We base our society on that consecrated and tellingly designated twosome "Man and Wife." We even continue to write more about marriage than about any other subject - although, as Carolyn Heilbrun points out, it is "the getting out of" rather than "the getting into" which now takes thematic precedence? But we also seek to protect and promote that civilization ofwhich the irksome third party is the most simple expression. The French, with their penchant for paradox, tackled the sexuality versus civilization problematic at the end of the last century and constructed the solution in the oldest civilized art. Of course, this allusion is to that dramatic eternal triangle, the bedroom farce. Eric Bentley argues in his apologia for farce and melodrama that bedroom farce preserves the couple by supplying a fanciful escape route into the adulterous playpen;3 it can be added that triangular farces also preserve civilization, by preserving not only the couple but also the triangle. It is true that the two most subversive theatre movements of the twentieth century - surrealism and absurdism - frequently take on the bedroom farce as a means of attacking civilization. Both Roger Vitrac and Samuel Beckett, for example, borrow the triangular intrigue in order to satirize what the structure represents. Nevertheless, neither Vitrac's Entree Libre nor Beckett's Comedie actually envisions an alternative reality. They do explode the spatial and temporal frame of the typical farce. They also exploit the comic devices of the JUDITH MILLER triangular intrigue to their own ends. However, a comparison of these two pieces with one of Eugene Labiche's prototypical bedroom farces will demonstrate the resiliency of the fundamental triangular form. Labiche did not invent the bedroom farce, but he did his share to popularize it, churning out in some thirty-odd years 173 plays. One of his last, Le plus heureux des trois (187°),4 written in collaboration with Edmond Gondinet, multiplies the primary triangular relationship ofHusband, Wife, and Lover six times. The only character to escape a triangle is the maid Petunia, who initially informs the public of the affair between Hermance (the Wife) and Ernest (the Lover), and who sets off the series of complications which keep the adulterous couple on the brink of exposure. As in most three-act bedroom farces, the plot is structured to delay and ultimately to prevent such exposure. A blackmailing cabby poses the main threat and provides an overall frame for the development ofthe action; but there are twenty other crisis points within the thirty-seven scenes between the rapid exposition (seven scenes) and lightning denouement (three scenes). In the expected but rather ingenious reversal at the play's end, the cabby - instead of fingering the Lover - accuses Marjavel (the Husband) of dallying. The Husband's embarrassed blustering deflects the revelation of Hermance and Ernest's affair. Marjavel, a typical "Husband," is a good-humored if gluttonous dupe, refusing to entertain even the slightest suspicion of his dear friend Ernest's treason. Hermance, a typical "Wife," is both clever and guilt-ridden. Ernest and his uncle and double Jobelin are typical "Lovers" - sentimentally showy but emotionally uninvolved. The married servants, Alsatians Krampach and Lisbeth, share characteristics typical of both "Domestics" and "Husbands and Wives." Quaintly ridiculous (dumb, in fact), Krampach is as unseeing as Marjavel, while Lisbeth is dumb but manipulative. Caricatures all, these Bergsonian "repeating machines" grope their ways through the intricacies of extramarital lust, wounding little more than their pride. Such automated human beings and their antitypes, humanized things (here a cuckoo clock which makes appropriate comments and a homed stag's head which symbolically acknowledges "the situation...