(The Magnificent Cuckold centers on the marriage of Bruno ...)
The Magnificent Cuckold centers on the marriage of Bruno and Stella and shows how their marriage falls apart. It a little resembles such great tragi-comedies as Strindberg's Dance of Death, Pirandello's Henry IV and America's own A Streetcar Named Desire.
(Mad for Love by the Franco-Belgian Fernand Crommelynck, a...)
Mad for Love by the Franco-Belgian Fernand Crommelynck, a tragedy set at a resort hotel on the North Sea coast of Flanders in the early 1920s, tells of two pairs of lovers: one of them old and decrepit, the other young and fresh.
Fernand Crommelynck was a Belgian playwright known for farces in which commonplace weaknesses are developed into monumental obsessions. Crommelynck, considered by some scholars to be a major French-language playwright, composed works in which he explored man’s capacity for evil by employing a mixture of the comic and tragic.
Background
Ethnicity:
Crommelynck was born to a French mother and a Belgian father.
Fernand Crommelynck was born on November 19, 1886, in Paris, France. Crommelynck, who was the child of a French mother and a Belgian father, came from a family connected with the theatre and was himself trained as an actor. Fernand Crommelynck moved to Belgium with his family.
Career
Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck, considered by some scholars to be a major French-language playwright, composed works in which he explored man’s capacity for evil by employing a mixture of the comic and tragic. In his mature plays, Crommelynck particularly focused on certain personality traits, such as greed and jealousy, and how they led to disaster. Stylistically, Crommelynck heavily employed characteristics of the farce, among them physical violence, slapstick, nonsensical plots, masks, stock characters, and crowd scenes. His most famous play, Le cocu magnifique (translated both as The Magnificent Cuckold and The Magnamimous Cuckold) well demonstrates the stylistic qualities for which Crommelynck’s plays are known.
Crommelynck grew up in the theater district of Paris, where his father was an actor, and at age fourteen he made his own theatrical debut at the Bouffes Parisiens. When his family later moved to Brussels, Crommelynck took up the pen. In 1906 he published in a Belgian magazine a one-act version of Le sculpteur de masques (The Sculptor of Masks) and the short story “Clematyde.” When his pastoral comedy. Nous dirons plus au bois, was staged that same year, it garnered the Thyrse Prize. In 1908 Crommelynck married, and he and his wife resided in Ostend. There Crommelynck met Belgian painter James Ensor, whose masks and grotesque images influenced him. By 1911 Crommelynck had expanded the one-act Le sculpteur de masques into a three-act version. From 1916 to 1918 he founded and ran the Flying-Theater, an acting troupe in Brussels that eventually dissolved because of financial problems.
When The Magnificent Cuckold premiered in Paris in 1920, it was an immediate popular success and would remain the most successful of Crommelynck’s works. In this play, Bruno is so afraid that his wife Stella has been unfaithful to him that he forces her to have sexual relations with various men in order to discover which one is her supposed lover. Although Bruno’s tactic does not answer his question, it so demeans Stella that she renounces him and leaves with another man. As in his other plays, in The Magnificent Cuckold Crommelynck focussed on a single negative characteristic - jealousy - rather than the main character’s overall psychological makeup. The work garnered praise and launched Crommelynck’s career. In a 1923 review of the play, Ashley Dukes, writing in The Youngest Drama, judged that Crommelynck broadened the scope of French drama: “His reductio ad absurdum of the sexual motive imparts new vigor to the theme. His comedy is cruel and grandiloquent, but it is elemental.” In his review for Theatre Arts Monthly, Charles Morgan gave the play a mixed assessment. Although The Magnificent Cuckold “is a bold and interesting experiment in theatrical method, it has not behind its bludgeoning assault the strength to wound deeply nor, in its many ingenuities of symbolism, the wisdom to create an enduring delight,” wrote Morgan, who concluded, “The play’s power of provocation is greater than its substance.” Bettina Knapp pointed out in Comparative Literature that Crommelynck shocked audiences because not only did he focus on the pathological, he “introduced voyeurism, phallus worship and all types of sexual perversions,” blaming these anomalies on then-contemporary society.
Crommelynck's other plays include Les amants puérils (The Childish Lovers), in which two young lovers discover that life is a degrading experience, not the fairy tale they believed it to be. Tripes d'or (Golden Guts) revolves around a miser, who is so possessive of his sudden inheritance - gold - that he grinds it into power and eats it. Later he dies painfully of a bowel obstruction. Carine, which employs pantomime, ballet, and masks, deals with the emotional destruction of a sensitive girl who dreams only of loving and being loved in return. In Chaud et froid ou l’idée de Monsieur Dom (Hot or Cold), Mr. Dom is memorialized after his death by the wife, Leona. A femme fatale, Leona did not love her husband and had numerous affairs; yet shortly before Dorn’s death she discovers that for a decade he had been having an affair with a younger woman. Leona, however, wants to be the sole possessor of Dorn’s memory and she immortalizes him in a “Domist” cult. Une femme qu’a le coeur trop petit (A Small-hearted Woman), a satire of middle-class matrons, portrays a self-righteous woman who turns into a tyrant in her home.
In her study for Comparative Drama, Bettina Knapp analyzed Crommelynck’s dramatic style, pointing out its similarities to German Expressionism, which frequently exaggerated a particular psychological characteristic. “Crommelynck’s theatre is neither a civic festival nor a morality lesson, nor is it designed for relaxation. It is a theatre of action, of psychological probing, of violence and of fascinating and bizarre machinations. It is a composite of opposites: serious drama and farce.” Crommelynck often portrayed the inability of men and women to communicate with each other, going so far as to portray it as a fundamental power struggle. The characters in his plays use specific language and gestures. “Crommelynck’s theatre, linguistically speaking, is one of violence insofar as man’s needs and personality are concerned,” wrote Knapp. “His characters’ speech, their situations, and their personalities are objects: wooden, hard, unbending. Yet, lyricism frequently prevails when experiencing love crises.” The dramatist used such figures of speech as antitheses and repetitions, slang phrases, neologisms, clichés, puns, and onomatopoeias. Actors use slapstick, exaggerated pantomime, and beatings in the Franco- Belgian tradition of the farce, which dates from the Middle Ages. Writing about The Magnificent Cuckold in her study, The Belgian Theater since 1890, Suzanne Lilar asserted, “The dialogue, it can be said without hesitation, revivified the language of the Belgian theatre. Nobody until then had so thoroughly explored verbal resources. Crommelynck not only scored points for poetry but loosened the ties language has with the rational and explored the power of suggestion it contains.”
Crommelynck’s output decreased markedly after 1934. During the war years, he lived in Paris and later Brussels, where he managed the Théâtre des Galeries. Because he had long believed Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff to be the quintessential comic figure, in the 1950s Crommelynck adapted Henry IV. In his Le chevalier à la lune ou Sir John Falstaff de William Shakespeare, he focused on Falstaff as a comedian.
As a writer of farces, Crommelynck was a serious commentator on society. “Crommelynck’s farces are not happy; indeed, they are touched with tragedy,” stated Knapp in her book-length study of the playwright. “Crommelynck reveals a crumbling and disintegrating society whose values hamper man’s evolution rather than encourage it. His world is peopled with grotesque characters making their plight known through horrendous outbursts. Absurd and unreal qualities enter into the frenetic antics of the protagonists but... humor clothes an underlying spirit of anguish and revulsion.”
Connections
In 1908 Crommelynck married. He had a son named Aldo Crommelynck, 1931-2009, who was a renowned master printmaker, who worked with many major artists of the twentieth century.