The play / comedy The Perfect System is an adaptation of "Ribadier's System", a delicious comedy in three acts by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Hennequin, performed for the first time in November 1892. The main theme is the stratagem of a husband to escape from the conjugal home, hypnotizing his wife.
Our late artist and director Ion Caramitru wanted to direct this play and, as a coincidence, another director with Aromanian roots, Toma Enache, will stage the play by the author, Georges Feydeau, who is extremely well known in our country for another masterpiece "La puce à l'oreille – The Flea in Her Ear".
Georges Feydeau (1862 - 1921) was a French playwright from the period called La Belle Époque, known for his farces and vaudevilles.
The critic of the newspaper Le Figaro (from the time of its launch –1892), Henry Fouquier, considered the play "perhaps the most solidly constructed and with the most ingenious plot of all the plays that Maurice Feydeau has offered us" and that Feydeau embroidered a farce with comedy and fantasy. A comment from the same newspaper said: "From one end to the other of the evening, we only saw shining faces, beautiful eyes wet with tears of joy, shoulders shaken by so much laughter and many applauses".
After Feydeau's death in 1921, his plays suffered years of oblivion, until interest in them was revived in the 1940s. Le Système Ribadier was restaged in 1963 in a production directed by Jacques François. The online magazine "Les Archives du Spectacle" notes that 15 different productions of the play have been performed in Paris and other cities in France so far, including a 2007 production at the Théâtre Montparnasse, which was filmed for television and dozens of other adaptations around the world.
Over time, the play has been taken up and presented at the most successful theaters in the world. First in Berlin in 1893. An English adaptation, "His Little Dodge" was presented in London in 1896, running for 81 performances. The same version was given in New York the following year by Edward E. Rice's company. An adaptation with the name "Monsieur Rebadier's System" was offered to the public in the USA in 1979, with Roderick Cook in the role of Ribadier. A 2009 version entitled "Where There's a Will" was presented on a British tour, directed by the great British director Sir Peter Reginald Frederick Hall, receiving very warm reviews. To date, the play has been successfully performed on all meridians of the world.
