L’Affaire de la Queen’s Necklace
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Call it the Epcot Syndrome of script writing. Like that multicultural annex of the Magic Kingdom, which re-creates cities from all over the world so you don’t have to bother going to see them, writers seem more and more intent on creating new “period” dramas, reasonable facsimiles and pastiches of centuries-old scripts. Theater and film audiences alike have been subjected over the past few years to “new” Moliere (La Bete), “new” Frank Capra (the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy), and “new” Fritz Lang, Anton Chekhov, and Ingmar Bergman courtesy of a certain neurotic Manhattan scribe. There’s nothing wrong per se with re-creating long-gone epochs and theatrical forms if a writer has something to say about them. People like Peter Shaffer have done it with great success. But when the object is merely to imitate something that someone else has done better, the whole effort seems pointless.
Set in the court of Versailles during the reign of Louis XVI, L’Affaire de la Queen’s Necklace is a historically based account of how a group of cunning thieves enlist the aid of a seer and a corrupt cardinal to steal a magnificent necklace made for Marie Antoinette; in so doing, they touch off the civic unrest that ultimately leads to the 1789 French Revolution. The play is littered with the usual suspects: wily and giggly ladies of the evening, a madame with a heart of gold, a trio of proud and lustful thieves, a seemingly doomed starry-eyed couple, a toady of a jeweler, a fraudulent prophet, a cackling, deranged gravedigger, and of course the absolutely sweet Marie.
