The novel reprises Shakespeare's mercurial farce about Athenian lovers and fairy royalty wandering around a forest at night, falling in and out of besottedness at the instigation of the mischievous Puck.
Then head to One Man, Two Guvnors, a charming chef's surprise of a comedy that tosses in music hall, vaudeville, slapstick, farce, Shakespearean clowns, lovers in disguise, and birds and blokes who fancy each other and somehow turns it all into a tasty dish.
For us lovers of farce, who think Feydeau is just as important as Ibsen, it is an evening of sheer joy.
When he appeared on Broadway in "Lunatics and Lovers," Sidney Kingsley's farce about New York lowlifes in a Times Square hotel, Brooks Atkinson, the theater critic of The New York Times, enthused that his role was "the best part Mr. Kingsley has written" and said "Mr. Hackett plays it with exuberance".
The tragic tale of doomed lovers is transformed into glorious farce, including the personifications of Wall and Moonshine, and Bottom as Pyramus dying a hundred histrionic deaths.
There was the one about the devil who was afraid of his wife; the one he adapted from the Roman playwright Terence; and then there was "The Mandrake," a satiric, bawdy, often scatological farce involving the timeless trio of aspiring lover, stupid husband, and venal priest, all conspiring to get a Renaissance Sophia Loren into bed.
Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole is what one always hoped for, a most beautifully constructed farce set to music, about a series of lovers being carried into a wife's bedroom in a grandfather clock.
The FARC called the move a "farce".
Both a tour de force and a tour de farce - tonight Russell Brand is clown, philosopher, critic, pundit, lover, cad - all things to all men and, of course, to all women - as if that was ever in doubt.
A full-blown academico-Gothic farce, in which a self-effacing white male book lover acquires the mysterious power to make people do whatever he wants; he employs this knack against a Midwestern English department full of theorists and freaks.
