Eugène Labiche

Paris, 1870. Adultery ought to be a serious business - but it's hard to keep your dignity when the cleaning lady has a fireman in your kitchen and she suspects that something is up. Not to mention the fact that your lover is not only stuck halfway up a drainpipe but is also your husband's very best friend. And as for the blackmailing taxi driver - he knows everything! The Threesome is a feast of finely tuned extra-marital mayhem from the master of French farce. This version was produced at the Lyric, Hammersmith in March 2000.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A classic 19th-century French farce by Eugène Labiche. Fadinard is on the way to his wedding when his horse eats a straw hat hanging on a bush. The owner of the hat is a former girlfriend who insists that Fadinard buys her a new hat instantly. He sets off to find a replacement hat, followed by his fiancée and all their guests. The play develops into a delirious chase as Fadinard hunts the hat and the guests hunt Fadinard and comic misunderstandings litter every scene. Eugène Labiche's play An Italian Straw Hat was premiered at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris in 1851. This English version, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Kenneth McLeish.

(Applause Books). An accidental grope on a dimly lit bus earns for the painter, Antoine, a slap whose force resounds around Labiche's wildly comic labyrinth, from which there is no escape, except, alas, for romance and marriage. In A Matter of Wife and Death, an eccentric millionaire, Tim van Lust, is perpetually frustrated in his super-passionate proposals of marriage. Van Lust's despair and an attempt at comical self-destruction, are short-lived, however, as fate and an unexpected telegram from America tie one knot while unravelling another.