Epidemia
The Epidemic

Summary/Abstract: The Epidemic (L'Épidemie) is one of the six one-act plays by Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) — a French playwright, prosaist and publicist of the modernism period. The plays were presented on stages in Paris between 1894–1904 and published in 1904 under the title: Farces and Morality Plays (Farces et moralités). Similarly to the earlier works, the writer traces various pathologies of social lives, unmasking the absurd represiveness of police and malfunctioning of law, Strindbergian hell of married life and conventional emptiness of love affection, cynicism of tendentious media pursuing sensations and cowardly egoism of bourgeois politicians. The genuity of Mirbeau's stage miniatures is not only due to the force of social contestation, but also to the perspicacity of critical diagnosis, which also applies to the linguistic layer as the source of banality and the tool of social pressure. Farces and Morality Plays are also an interesting example of combination of literary tradition and innovation. They follow the tradition of medieval moral play, which aimed at teaching the audience by employing jesting exagguration, play on words, caricature and grotesque eagerly used in farce. All these elements somehow create an artistic quality, which anticipates the theater of Bertold Brecht and Marcel Aymé, Harold Pinter and Eugčne Ionesco. The Epidemic appears for the first time in Polish. The translation was based on the original version of the text by: Octave Mirbeau, Théâtre complet, vol. IV, Farces et moralités, présentation, édition et notes par Pierre Michel, Eurédit, Paris 2003. The footnotes are partly based on the comments in this edition.

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