Le Mariage de Figaro (Pierre Beaumarchais), 2012

Le Mariage de Figaro, later adapted by Mozart into the well-known opera, was written 5 years before the French Revolution. Count Almaviva now regrets the promise he made to his wife Rosine in the previous installment, The Barber of Seville, to renounce his “droit de seigneur”, mainly because he fancies his valet Figaro’s fiancée, Suzanne. His one-track attempts to realise his desires come up against a combination of the spurned Countess’s anger and the quick thinking of the arch-improviser Figaro and his resourceful wife-to-be, plus the unexpected discovery of a long-lost mother. Social and gender politics crackle through Beaumarchais’s brilliant dialogue and visual imagination, aided by plenty of coups de théâtre.