Le trocheur de maris

One of the few plays that offers female protagonists, Le Trocheur de maris is a delightful play about three women who decide to trade in their old husbands for new at the shop of the Husband Trader. Unfortunately, none are to their liking and they decide to remain instead with the men they started with. Rather than simply the typical sexual and scatalogical innuendo that I have come to expect from farces, Le Trocheur de maris adds a flair for the surrealist that we will find in several other farces from this period. The idea that there is such a man as a Husband Trader opens the genre up to more absurdist kinds of comedy that poke fun at the fabric of society instead of the bodily functions of its inhabitants. This sort of absurdism in French theatre persists to this day, and the theme of the impossible as commonplace only becomes funnier with time.