About the work
Comedy in three acts by Jean Giraudoux. Louis Jouvet staged the premiere on 27 February 1933 at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris; the German-language premiere followed in Hamburg in 1950, directed by Karl-Heinz Stroux.
Plot
The provincial teacher Isabelle allows herself a rapturous interlude with a ghostly, youthful spirit who lures her out of her orderly bourgeois life. The tension between this romantic longing and the representatives of bourgeois order forms the core of the play.
Cultural significance
Critics described the play as a lighter, more bitter comedy compared with Giraudoux’s heavier, more consoling dramas – a deliberate interlude within the author’s body of work, set between weightier plays.