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    A Study Guide for Jean Cocteau's "Indiscretions"
    A Study Guide for Jean Cocteau's "Indiscretions"
    A Study Guide for Jean Cocteau's "Indiscretions"
    Ebook45 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jean Cocteau's "Indiscretions"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jean Cocteau's "Indiscretions," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 12, 2016
    ISBN9781535826082
    A Study Guide for Jean Cocteau's "Indiscretions"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Jean Cocteau's "Indiscretions" - Gale

      1

      Indiscretions

      Jean Cocteau

      1938

      Introduction

      Indiscretions is the English translation of Les Parents Terribles, by the French playwright and poet Jean Cocteau, which was written and first performed in 1938. The play is available as Les Parents Terribles (Indiscretions), translated into English by Jeremy Sams (1995). When it was first produced in Paris, the play scandalized audiences with its portrayal of diseased love infecting a bourgeois family in 1930s Paris, and it was subsequently banned from the publicly owned theater by the city authorities. It still retains its power to shock. In the play, Cocteau returns to the theme of incest, which he previously explored in the play La Machine Infernale, produced and published in 1934.

      To show a young man's attempts to escape the suffocating love of his mother, Indiscretions draws upon the ancient Greek story of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. While Cocteau's play shares the tragic inevitability and melodrama of the Oedipus story, its elements of farce, sense of the absurd, and hilariously comic dialog cause the audience often to laugh at the most emotionally fraught moments.

      Author Biography

      The French poet, playwright, novelist, artist, and film maker Jean Maurice Eugene Clement Cocteau was born to a wealthy family on July 5, 1889, in the small town of Maisons-Lafitte near Paris, France. His father committed suicide when Cocteau was ten years old. Cocteau was attracted to the theater at an early age. He loved to see his mother dressed for the theater, created toy theaters, and staged productions with his siblings. He briefly attended school, but was expelled.

      By 1916, Cocteau was associating with an avant-garde group in Paris which included the painters Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso; the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Guillaume Apollinaire; and the Russian ballet master Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev challenged Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, and the result was the ballet Parade (1917). The music was composed by Erik Satie, and the sets and costumes were by Picasso. The first performance caused a scandal because of its modernist nature. The audience rioted, and Cocteau commented that had it not been for the presence of Apollinaire, who was dressed in his military uniform and had a war wound, the authors of the ballet would have been attacked.

      Though Cocteau was exempted from military service in World War I, he went to the front as a volunteer and drove ambulances. His reputation for frivolity was not helped by the fact that he had an outfit designed by a couturier for him to wear there, but the war made a deep impression on him. He wrote about his experiences in his novel Thomas l'Imposteur (Thomas the Imposter, 1923). A friendship he formed during the war with the aviator Roland Garros inspired Cocteau's first acclaimed book of

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