ARCHIVES 2002 / La Triologie de la villégiature (The Holiday Trilogy)

The eighteenth century left to the theatre a legacy of a taste for pleasure and playfulness. In France, there was Marivaux, in Italy, Goldoni, an author who Jean-Louis Benoit endeavours to interpret. He is staging the Trilogie de la villégiature (Trilogia della Villeggiatura), translated by Félicien Marceau. It is a farce that recounts the adventures and difficulties of a small community preparing to go away on holiday. However, behind this scrumptious account of idle, penniless, even ruined people, lies another. A few years before The French Revolution, Goldoni, who later witnessed the French bourgeoisie' s take-over of power, paints a derisive and revealing picture of the Italian bourgeois. Over and above the group portait, where each person spends his or her time copying their neighbour, where money builds and destroys bonds of love, where love itself is never satisfied, Goldoni tells of the failure of men and women who pass by their destiny and miss the rendezvous that history is preparing for them. Only one woman, Giacinta, exceptionally bright and dignified, saves the honour of these narrow-minded bourgeois whom the author pins down as ferociously as a cartoonist. The comedy turns sour, the marriages are only out of self-interest and Jean-Louis Benoit delights in exploring the murky distinctions between tears and laughter, between seriousness and light-heartedness.