Indiscretions (Les Parents Terribles)
By Jean Cocteau. Translated by Jeremy Sams.
Product Code: I55000
Full-length Play
Comedy | Drama
Cast size: 2m., 3w.
Rights and availability
This title can be licensed and sold in the following countries:
Canada, United States
* Please note the royalty rate listed is the minimum royalty rate per performance. The actual royalty rate will be determined upon completion of a royalty application.
Synopsis
Introduced by Simon Callow, this new translation of Les Parents Terribles is published alongside the 1994 Royal National Theatre production. "Truly wicked fun … Yvonne, George and Leonie, respectively the semi-invalid mother, mad inventor father, and austere auntie of Michael, a rambunctious young man, all share a chaotic Paris flat together as well as some unsavory affections. Yvonne is totally consumed with her handsome son, who expresses his reciprocal fondness … Icy Leonie still burns for George, who jilted her for Yvonne. As far as George, well, Yvonne's neglect has forced him to look elsewhere for comfort. The dirty laundry starts to fly when Michael reveals he wants to marry a charming girl named Madeline. Even as Yvonne storms about in a green-eyed fury, George discovers that Michael's intended is his own secret mistress. Cuckolded by his unaware son, George enlists Leonie's aid in quashing the match … How's that for a first act? And there're two more crazyhouse acts to go before Indiscretions careens to its conclusion. Think of Indiscretions as a French bon-bon laced with forbidden goodies, not the least of which is the perverse hilarity of Jeremy Sams' translation." (The Star Ledger) Available in manuscript only.
Details
- Status In stock
- Type of Show Full-length Play
- Product Code I55000
- Minimum Cast Size 5
- Pages of Dialogue 72
- Min. Royalty Rate $90.00/perf
- Approx. Run Time 90 min
- Staging Two int. sets.
Categories
- Target Audience College and Adult | Senior Adults
- Performing Group College Theatre | Community Theatre | Professional Theatre
- Genre Comedy | Drama
- ISBN(13) 9781854592569
Media Reviews
"Cocteau wrote the piece in eight opium-sozzled days, and it has an atmosphere all of its own … Four years earlier, he tackled the Oedipus story … In Les Parents Terribles he returns to the theme of incest, but this time the diseased love is infecting a bourgeois family in 1930s Paris and provides the basis for a bruising melodrama. Yet, in Jeremy Sam's sparky new translation, even when emotion rises to its most torrid climaxes, you often catch yourself laughing." -Daily Telegraph"Fifty-six years after its Parisian premiere, Jean Cocteau's portrait of a bourgeois French family in sexual disarray has lost little of its capacity to astonish …" -Evening Standard
"In Sam's witty translation, the play comes across as a piece of self-sustaining irony that owes as much to Feydeau as to classical tragidy … like a camp version of Oedipus Rex." -Guardian