Amidst all the national hand-wringing over the fate of those forlorn, native North Africans and Middle-Easterners fleeing the unspeakable horrors perpetrated by bloody tyrants and religious fanatics, it is far too easy to overlook the individual tragedies and lifelong psychological scarring accompanying such events, that in truth, only a comfortable armchair can ignore.

One of the notable things about Feydeau was his ability to spin a piece of fluff into a complete suit of clothes. His art is to set up a ridiculously flimsy premise by way of a plot, which then develops its own logic in which the characters are caught up with apparently no means of escape. His is a world of entitlement and ease flavoured, in some quarters, with a certain license occasioned by the Enlightenment and the subsequent loosening of the grip of the Catholic church over the minds and morals of the middle and upper classes.

Farce is as old as Western comedy itself and perhaps finds its full flowering in the French theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century, when many of the usual devices such as extravagant plot are kept whilst stock characterization gives way to more nuanced treatment. Monsieur Popular is by one of the masters of the genre, Eugène Marin Labiche . . . Monsieur Popular is a delightfully tasty blancmange of a play, full of unpretentious fun and I would not be surprised to find it coming back to the main house in the not too distant future.

Florian Zeller is a clever writer. Instinctively it appears, he has learned one of the peculiar strengths of the theatre; the relationship between spectator and actor, in tandem with one of the most precious of dramatic skills, how to manipulate the audience. We saw it in The Father and here in The Mother (the first of the duo) we have that rug-pulling ability that makes us question what we see and what the actors are seeing.