page_title: Octave Mirbeau
section_title: Mirbeau's theatre
hierarchical_section_title: Octave Mirbeau / Biography / Mirbeau's theatre
caption_attribution_description: Front Page of Home (1908) by Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) and Thadée Natanson (1868-1951)
context_page_description: Octave Mirbeau was a French novelist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, journalist, and playwright, who achieved celebrity in Europe and great success among the public, while still appealing to the literary and artistic avant-garde with highly transgressive novels that explored violence, abuse and psychological detachment. His work has been translated into thirty languages.
context_section_description: In the theatre, Mirbeau made his first steps with a proletarian drama and modern tragedy, Les Mauvais bergers (The Bad Shepherds, 1897). Then he experienced worldwide acclaim with Les affaires sont les affaires (Business is business, 1903) — his classical comedy of manners and characters in the tradition of Molière. Here Mirbeau featured the character of Isidore Lechat, predecessor of the modern master of business intrigue, a product of the new world, a figure who makes money from everything and spreads his tentacles out over the world.
  In 1908 — at the end of a long legal and media battle
  — Mirbeau saw his play Le Foyer (Home) performed by the Comédie-Française. In this work, he broached a new taboo subject, the economic and sexual exploitation of adolescents in a home that pretended to be a charitable one.
  He also wrote six one act plays, published under the title of Farces et moralités (1904), among them being L'Épidémie (Epidemics, 1898). Here, Mirbeau can be seen as anticipating the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Aymé, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco. He calls language itself into question, demystifying law, ridiculing the discourse of politicians, and making fun of the language of love (Les Amants, The Lovers, 1901).
caption: Le Foyer
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