Review of Hotel Paradiso (1905) by George Feydeau and Maurice Desvallieres, English adaptation by Peter Glenville, performed  at Bridport Arts Centre by the Encore Theatre Club 

THIS IS a play about sex. You never hear the word “sex” mentioned, but its promises and its disappointments are there right from the very start, in the long lugubrious face of Benedict Boniface, a builder, chastised by his wife for having “no taste” when it comes to choosing materials for her dresses. “The ladies,” he says in an aside to the audience, “if one could picture them twenty years later, how cautious one would be.”

It’s a frustrating situation for Boniface who pictures his insides as “seething molten lava”, in contrast to the icy and unresponsive nature of his friend and business partner, the architect Henri Cot. Cot’s wife Marcelle complains of feeling unloved. Cot scorns her claims that she could find satisfaction elsewhere. She says: “less attractive women than I have found consolation outside the home.” And so the engine of the plot is cranked up. Boniface’s wife Angelique has to go away to visit her sister; he offers Marcelle the “consolation” she’s been considering. The two of them agree they will avenge Cot’s slights by dining at a restaurant and then visiting the Hotel Paradiso.

Hotel Paradiso is a classic French farce, brilliantly plotted. It has multiple strands, twists and turns. For example: Cot’s nephew Max is a handsome young student of philosophy, who reads Spinoza’s thoughts on passion and wears glasses he doesn’t need to, so as to make himself look more intellectual. He’s espied and sized up – with a marvellous glancing flutter of the eyes – by the Bonifaces’ pretty maid Victoire. Soon, they are sat side-by-side. “I cannot study passion with a woman next to me,” he protests. “How is a young man supposed to find out about passion from a book?” she asks. Victoire – literally – tickles his fancy and they too end up at the Hotel Paradiso.

The hotel’s name stands for all the hopes that humankind has invested in “passion” but its final “o” hints at the exclamations of sorrow that may follow time spent there. Holes are drilled in the wall by the hotel’s rascally owner. Ghosts may – or may not – howl like lost libidos. “O what a night… O what a lesson” laments Marcelle, her idea of romance not being poked with a big cigar and told – rather crudely – that she’d look better with no clothes on.

It’s important not to make this production by the Encore Theatre Club sound saucier than it is. It’s played in quite a naturalistic, bourgeois style. If anything it’s played in too much of an old-fashioned English style, and not enough of a French one, because it is a very French play, in two main ways.

Firstly, in its feelings about erotic life: “an absurd or destructive infatuation may be a wiser, deeper, morally more beautiful thing than an ordained prudence, especially when, as often, prudence is dominated by ambition, mediocrity or absence of sexual passion. The path to truth leads through the turbulence of passions, not round it” (Raymond Durgnat).

Secondly, the characters in the play are shaped partly according to the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter (in Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique, 1900). According to Bergson, audiences laugh at people whose minds and bodies are so stiff that they can’t react flexibly enough to situations; laughter acts as a warning to such people to perk themselves up, to save themselves from squaredom. Hence (for example) the amused maid Victoire making Max take his heavy spectacles off.

In a farce like Hotel Paradiso, characters are constantly having to react to unexpected situations. The problem for actors is that this kind of drama calls for a style of acting that’s perhaps most simply described as “now you see it, now you don’t”. On the one hand, actors have to present their characters to the audience as comic fools, lacking in sprightly self-awareness; but they also have to make it seem as if their characters really believe that they are in control of things. This calls for a modulation of voice and look and gesture that – in this production – comes and goes. The first act is the weakest, and sometimes rather drags. Benedict Boniface (Steve Scorey) is not lusty and conniving enough in seeking to persuade Marcelle to commit adultery with him; he doesn’t, as it were, seem to be secretly congratulating himself on what he’s hoping to get away with. But the second act gets much stronger – helped by the change of scene to the Hotel Paradiso, and a very good set – and the third act boasts the best moments of all.

Everyone taking part, at different points, really shines: to give quite a few examples – Boniface gliding down the hotel stairs singing, Angelique (Hilary Bosworth) tearful that her husband seems to believe allegations made against her; Cot (Jean-Paul Draper) sitting down discomfited with his telegram; Marcelle (Louisa Hardy) pacing back and forth in her beastly hotel room; Monsieur Martin (Barry Irvine), in a pair of splendid plus-fours, stuttering as a rainstorm suddenly breaks out; his daughters Violette and Pervenche (Tessa Bide and Elizabeth Blake) playing at white-faced ghosts; Victoire (Emma Batchelor) scampering through the hotel; Max (Dominic Himsworth) enjoying the final turn of events; Anniello the hotel manager (John Pownall) pronouncing “gentleman” with insolent sardonic relish; his porter Georges (Chris Bignall) picking up his master’s tricks; the police Inspector Bouchard (John Surry) remembering Madame Boniface as not quite so “ambitious” in physique; the umbrella-wielding English Governess (Babs Probert) standing for no foreign nonsense; Antoinette, a lady (Sandra Brown) and her Duke (Stephan Gough) swayingly importuning a room, then thinking better of it. Sandra Brown sports a lovely costume, with legs striped black and purple.        

The Encore Theatre Club have been rehearsing two nights a week since September, and reading through the play since early summer. Hotel Paradiso is directed by John Haylock, a former deputy head at Woodroffe School in Lyme Regis. He’s acted with Encore before, but this is the first time he’s directed. In conversation he displays the wary exhilaration you’d expect of a man about to unleash his first theatrical vision upon the world.

“Working with people that I know so well has been a delightful experience, but it’s been frightening too. There have been times when I’ve thought that we wouldn’t get it where I wanted it to be, but we’re there now.”

Hotel Paradiso is peformed by the Encore Theatre Club at 7.30pm at Bridport Arts Centre, Tuesday November 3 – Saturday November 7. Tickets £7 Tuesday, £8 Wednesday to Saturday. Students, half-price.

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