LE BOURRU BIENFAISANT

Géronte, a kind-hearted old man with an unpredictable and fundamentally grumpy temperament, decides to marry off his orphaned niece, Angélique, to his best friend Dorval, a confirmed old bachelor. However, she is secretly in love with Valère, though she doesn’t dare admit it to her uncle... Meanwhile, Angélique’s brother, who is bankrupt, wants to send her to a convent until he can pay off his debts, in order to provide her with a dowry. To do so, he tries to extort money from her uncle…*The Gruff Benefactor*, by Carlo Goldoni, is a cheerful comedy full of twists and turns that premiered in Paris in 1771, during the festivities marking the marriage of the future Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.Carlo Goldoni transformed Italian comedy. He managed to preserve the dynamism of the commedia dell’arte and the use of masks by combining them with plot-driven comedy and striving for a certain realism.The characters he created are mostly ordinary representatives of the common people and the bourgeoisie. This amused and mocking look at social classes in a changing world is still what gives his comedies their charm.


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