Where Figaro Does It Again

The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / A Mother's Guilt by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[This review is focusing on the third of the plays--I couldn't find an entry for just the one play.]

So--it's fine.

In context, in its time and milieu, this is probably pretty entertaining. I'm guessing, cuz i dunno. But the conventions seem odd now. French theatre of the time (based on nothing more than these three Beaumarchais plays and a few Moliere plays) seems mostly like angry people storming back and forth across the stage, arguing and/or crying, with whispering and eavesdropping interspersed randomly. The servants, notably Figaro here, conspire to make a happy ending (while promoting themselves, generally) though it feels like Figaro is given credit for being more brilliant than he ever proves to be. He's a schemer and a manipulator, and he does succeed in figuring out everyone's secrets so he can prevent a (worse) schemer from hurting his family, so I'll give him that credit. But he's no Sherlock or anything.

(I'm trying to think of a modern equivalent of the Figaro character, someone who discovers secrets and uses tricks and persuasion and lies to make it all turn out for the good and I've got nothing. I can only come up with villains, plotters, and backstabbers. Maybe the Long John Silver character on "Black Sails"? I dunno.)

The ending of this is pretty good, though the difficulties are all overcome in quick succession without a lot of drama. People shout at each other a lot in these plays, but then forgive each other and fall back in love very easily. I guess Shakespeare used the same trope, so it's got a history...

Having read all three, I guess my takeaway is that the prevailing mood in these comedies is anger, with the happy bit coming about a page or a minute from the end. I don't love that.

YMMV

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Where Figaro Fights the Powers that Be

The Marriage of Figaro by Beaumarchais
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the play, not the opera.

And it's okay. Frothy. All hijinks and mistaken identities and hiding behind furniture.

To be fair, the play deals with some important themes, especially the unearned power and authority of the aristocracy. Figaro is going to marry Suzanne, but the nobleman they both work for wants to sleep with her before Figaro does. He's said it. Everybody knows it. It's gross. In a long speech, Figaro is lamenting a political system that could allow that:

No, Your Lordship, you will not have her, you will not have her! Just because you're a great nobleman, you think you're a great genius! Being an aristocrat, having money, a position in society, holding public office--all that makes a man so arrogant! What have you ever done for all this wealth? You took the trouble to be born and nothing else!

Such language coming just years before the French Revolution, you can see why authorities didn't like it. In fact, in that same long speech, Figaro complains about censorship in the press and theater. But he also complains about women being unfaithful. It's kind of a wide-ranging rant and feels tacked on.

But mostly this is a silly romp. Figaro is getting married; the count has lost interest in his own wife and wants Figaro's; young lovers are getting in trouble; and a number of characters have designs on other characters, to the point that Marceline tries to force Figaro to marry her through appeal to the court but turns out to be his long-lost mother. Ooops! And we just move on. The play is filled with schemes that don't work and tricks that are discovered and lucky coincidences, making the plot such a muddle you're just glad it all gets sorted in the end.

I can imagine this being staged in a clever, witty way, earning laughs, if the direction is really strong, but if they're not careful I think it'd end up just a mess.

I agree about the aristocrats, though. He had a point.

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Where Figaro Gets His Start

The Barber of Seville by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is somewhat entertaining; I suspect it would be a little more entertaining in the actual theater, performed instead of read. That's what pushed a 3.5 or so in my head to a 4. I'm sure this is funny in person.

The Benjamin Franklin series, where he meets with Beaumarchais in Paris, got me interested in reading this. I only have a vague idea of Figaro, mostly informed by Bugs Bunny cartoons, and assumed they were only operas. I didn't know that Beaumarchais was such a renaissance man, and I didn't know he wrote these plays (and got himself in trouble for them).

Part of my misapprehension, corrected by reading this first one, was that these were highbrow tales. I mean, opera, right? LOL. Nope.

So, as far as plotting and dialogue, this whole play is just Figaro helping Count Almaviva get access to Rosine, a beautiful young woman who is going to be forced to marry her guardian, Bartholo. (First of all--wtf? Who does this. Second--I recall an older Spanish play that is almost the exact thing, with the same opening sequence in the street outside the window...) Bartholo is a jerk taking advantage of a helpless young woman, so he's the villain, but literally everyone else spends most of the play lying or scheming to lie. Or accepting bribes.

The dishonesty strikes me as odd, and not very honorable in main characters. It's acceptable, maybe, to defeat the villain, but it's weird. I've had the same thought reading Dumas, where characters lie to each other and aren't even embarrassed when caught in the lies since, apparently, everyone else would do the same thing. I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, a cultural thing, or if it's a convention of French literature, but it's surprising to me. I'm trying to think of a non-villain in English literature of a similar era who lies like these guys do. Not Darcy or Edmund, for example. But I guess Tom Jones gets away with lies and bad behavior. Hmm. Maybe it's the era.....

So here, Figaro, kind of a trickster, is working to get all the servants sick or sleeping and get Bartholo out of the house so the count can sneak in and marry the girl. The comedy is in the lying and the goofy songs they are singing extemporaneously and, especially, the moments when the count (in disguise as a music teacher) is trying to whisper with Rosine, while the jealous and suspicious Bartholo keeps intervening.

It's a romp is what I'm saying. It's just young good guys outwitting an old jerk, tricking him and making up quick lies to win the girl away from him. That's fun.

The second play, The Marriage of Figaro, is supposed to be more subversive, more of a commentary on society and nobility, and it's the one that got Beaumarchais in trouble. I'm eager to see if it feels meatier. But sometimes something light and silly is just fine.

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