The theater of Fernand Crommelynck

Farce with tragic overtones and drama depicting human folly typify the oeuvre of Fernand Crommelynck. Although Crommelynck calls some of his plays farces, others dramas, and still others simply plays, the distinctions are arbitrary. Indeed, in the case of his most popular and important play, The Magnanimous Cuckold (1920), the author specifically declared that the work may be done as either a farce or a tragedy. He typically starts out from a realistic situation, then introduces a twist in the psyche of the main character that launches the rest of the action - for example, in The Magnanimous Cuckold a suspected glimmer of lust in Petrus's eye suffices to incite Bruno and to subjugate the other figures in the play to his expression of folly - and the realistic is soon overtaken by the obsessional and finally the absurd. Masks are an integral part of Crommelynck's theater in that they establish its sense of the grotesque.