by Georges Feydeau
Stratford Festival, Ontario, May 17 to September 14, 1996
A Stage Door Review by Roger Kershaw and Jim Lingerfelt

Confusion reigns in this Stratford comedy
Billed as a farce, this sometimes funny play was translated from the original French by Norman R. Shapiro. Playwright Georges Feydeau's humour springs essentially from the fear of chaos. Chaotic it is, throughout three acts.
-----Dr Moulineaux (Stephen Ouimette) stays out all night and then explains to his bride (Marion Day) that he was with a sick friend, Bassinet. Of course, Bassinet (Barry MacGregor) is not sick and the doctor ends up renting an apartment from his friend for his assignations with the ingenuous Suzanne (Jennifer Gould). The would-be mistress' husband (Wayne Best) follows her there and later brings his own mistress along (Sharon McFarlane)-who turns out to be the erstwhile happily long-lost wife of the doctor's friend. As always in Feydeau, the complications fly fast and furious until everyone manages to sort things out. Assisting in this free-for-all is the Moulineaux family butler (Bernard Hopkins); the redoubtable mother-of-the-bride, Madame Aigreville (Barbara Bryne); Madame d'Herblay (Diane D'Aquilar); Mimi (Chick Reid); and Stephen Ouimette's own dog, Squirt, in the role of Bijou.
-----Creative, eruptive sets by Morris Ertman contribute to the chaos, especially in the dressmaker's apartment as radiators steam, cats scamper across the stage, dressmakers' dummies break apart, and several other inventive disturbances occur. Martha Mann's early 1900s costumes are magnificently crafted.
-----Directed by Richard Monette, the production is a test of precision timing and is brilliantly acted, especially by Ouimette in a tour de force performance that, while the action appears to dissolve into anarchy, is always firmly in control.
-----However, the play was, and is, a farce, notwithstanding the program notes by David Prosser, which read more like a PhD dissertation: "[Feydeau's] plays depict a stable, bourgeois, materially solid world...a kind of Aristotelian purging, in which we confront and master the emotions not of pity and terror but of desire and guilt: a catharsis of mirth." If, after that mouthful, you are still interested in a afternoon of laughs, you can catch A Fitting Confusion at Stratford's Avon Theatre until September 14. For tickets, call, 1-800-576-1600.