A play in three acts that shifts from comedy to vaudeville. Adrien, a well-to-do bourgeois of 45, originally from the south, is deeply bored and decides to take up medicine again, which he studied in the past but never practiced.
It’s not unimaginable that Jules Romain might have been inspired by it for his famous Knock, the doctor who arrives in a small town and declares the entire population sick. Once the situation is set, the concerns of the other characters are entirely different. A legitimate wife, Madeleine, who lacks love and is not immune to the advances of the family friend, Gaston.
The apprentice doctor, irresistible and sufficiently misogynistic, who has recruited staff for his practice, falls in love with a former seamstress, hence the title “A Little Hand That Fits.” Everything is disrupted in the household, from the cook to the detective disguised as a valet.
Guitry delights in his favorite domain, the couple, fidelity, amidst a flourishing of puns, misunderstandings, and verbal misapplications that are highlighted by a group of actresses and actors who tackle this story full of verve and surprises with energy.
Written 20 years after his first play, the author is in the heart of the Roaring Twenties. The actors, who play very naturally, are supported by a set, costumes, and music that are very Charleston. Guitry knits a happy ending with a general philosophy that might be: “I am not the enemy of marriage but of bad marriages that harm love,” for tenderness and emotions are not absent from this subtle, outdated, and modern work.
Featuring Angélina Laine, Léa Libron, Anthéa Sogno, the Director of the Théâtre des Muses who blesses us each year with a Guitry, one of her favorite authors, Thibault Aragon, Olivier Broussard, Christian Guérin, and Albert Braquetti, in a production directed by Peter Bateson, which he created at the Théâtre Athéna in Nice.
Roland Haugade
