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Synopsis. Adapted from Jean Anouilh’s play Invitation to the Castle (1947), Ring Round the Moon is a whimsical jaunt of love and matchmaking. Set in the winter garden of an estate during a ball, the poor but lovely dancer Isabelle has arrived at the invitation of Hugo, a charming scoundrel and twin brother to Frederic, a young man hopelessly ...
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Official site. Ring Round the Moon is a 1950 adaptation by the English dramatist Christopher Fry of Jean Anouilh 's Invitation to the Castle (1947). Peter Brook commissioned Fry to adapt the play and the first production of Ring Round the Moon was given at the Globe Theatre.
- Christopher Fry
- 1950
Ring Round the Moon. Jean Anouilh's 50-year-old comedy is a distinctly strange play, peopled by a cast of grotesques. Even so, it gives three actors in central roles the chance to show off their talent. Ring Around the Moon is subtitled A Charade with Music and has apparent roots in commedia dell' arte, in which actors improvise around themes.
Complete summary of Jean Anouilh's Ring around the Moon. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of Ring around the Moon.
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
- Sources
- Further Reading
Jean Anouilh was born in Bordeaux in the southwest of France in 1910. His father was a tailor known for his meticulousness, and his mother, a pianist, played in the orchestra of a casino in a seaside resort outside Bordeaux. At the resort, the young Anouilh was able to watch frequent operettas, which nurtured his interest in theater. At nine, Anoui...
Act I
Ring Around the Moon opens with the aristocratic bon vivant,Hugo, talking with Joshua, his butler, both discussing Hugo’s brother, Frederic. Frederic has been sleeping outside his fiancee’s bedroom window while she is a guest at the family’s estate. Frederic and Hugo are identical twins, but Hugo is good with women and Frederic inept. Hugo and Joshua are unhappy with Frederic’s fawning over Diana Messerschmann, his fiancee. Hugo hints he will do something about it. Hugo leaves and Frederic en...
Act II
Act II opens at the ball with Capulat slyly giving up misguided bits of Hugo’s plot to get Madame to connect Hugo and Isabelle. Madame is mystified as to Capulat’s meaning and pulls her offstage to get the full story. Patrice enters with Lady India discussing Patrice’s terrible fear that Messerschmann will discover Patrice and Lady India’s affair. This excites India who romanticizes being poor. When Messerschmann enters, Patrice and Lady India leave, wondering if Messerschmann has seen them a...
Act III
When Act III opens, Hugo, his plans in disarray, desperately discusses a new and fantastic plan—no longer to match Isabelle with Frederic by having her fake her drowning—but to embarrass the rich guests by exposing Isabelle as a humble girl, not an upper-class debutante as he led them to believe. Isabelle, again disgusted with Hugo, will have none of it. Hugo exits and Diana enters and complains to Isabelle about the misfortune of wealth. Isabelle, poor as she is, is incensed and ends up figh...
Patrice Bombelles
Patrice Bombelles is male secretary to the wealthy industrialist, Messerschmann, and also the object of Messerschmann’s mistress’s (Lady India) attentions, which Bombelles has reciprocated for two years. Unsurprisingly, Bombelles does not want Messerschmann to find out about the secretive affair, since Bombelles believes it would mean his firing. So preoccupied is Bombelles to keep the affair with Lady India a total secret, he is constantly agitated, often forgetting or missing the subject of...
Geraldine Capulat
Capulat is, as Anouilh describes her, Madame Desmermortes’s “faded” servant/companion. She has a minor role until she is recognized by Isabelle’s mother as a long-lost friend with whom she once played piano duets. Capulat is both a hopeless romantic and a loyal friend and so cannot help but satisfy Isabelle’s mother in the attempt to get Madame to unite Hugo and Isabelle.
Madame Desmermortes
Desmermortes is the elderly, overly family-and class-conscious aunt of Hugo, Frederic, and Lady India. She is interested in her nephews and niece getting married to the right companions. By helping Hugo with his plans, by acting according to her own lights, and partly through sheer luck, Madame is successful. With a sometimes cruel, sometimes sober realism, Madame parries the hopeless romanticism of her servant/companion, Capulat. Madame’s somewhat hardened view of life is at least partially...
Wealth Versus Poverty
Two sets of class conflicts occur in Ring Around the Moon:that of older, aristocratic wealth versus newer, capitalist wealth, and both of these versus poverty. Old money is represented by Madame Desmermortes, her niece, and nephews; new money by Messerschmann, his daughter, and Romainville, head of Messerschmann’s pig-iron company. When Madame makes her first entrance with Hugo, discussing Messerschmann’s keeping of Lady India, Madame calls it “monstrous” and “humiliating,” because old money...
TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY
1. Beginning a decade or so before the French Revolution(1789), research the history of industrialism in France, focusing on the friction between the old-money aristocracy and the new-money bourgeoisie. Then write an essay detailing some of the consequences of such friction. 2. After researching the history and form of commedia dell’arte write an essay discussing how stock characters in that form resemble those in Ring Around the Moon. 3. Study Anouilh’s directions for music in Ring Around th...
Appearance versus Reality
The most obvious example of the theme of appearance versus reality in Ring Around the Moonis the use of identical, indistinguishable twins played by the same actor. But readers have an “advantage” over audience members: while readers know who is speaking, audience members cannot always tell. This robs readers of an intended confusion accessible to only those seeing a performance. That is, unless a director dresses Hugo and Frederic differently, or alters their appearance. The only characters...
Setting
Ring Around the Moontakes place at a French country estate in spring. Why spring? Probably because it is when romance is thought to “bloom.” The additional setting of a glassed-in rococo winter garden looking out on a “wide expanse of park” contributes to this fertile atmosphere. The home belongs to Madame Desmermortes and is occupied by her nephews, Hugo and Frederic, and her niece, Lady India, all of them attended by the butler, Joshua. All other characters are guests at the chateau.
Dialogue
The dialogue in Ring Around the Moonis entirely social: it contains no soliloquies. Dialogue, as the word indicates, is always directed at someone, most often taking the form of persuasion, coercion, or attack. Recall the dialogue about money between Messerschmann and Isabelle, Hugo’s numerous coercions of Romainville, Patrice, and Isabelle, and Diane’s toying with Frederic. This is dialogue as manipulation.
Music
Music occurs primarily in Act II at the evening ball, where it may reinforce the idea that precise and numerous entrances and exits of a multitude of characters are a kind of comedic dance. When Hugo blackmails Patrice into acting as Isabelle’s jealous lover, a kind of battle of wits results, and so Anouilh calls for a “heroic, warlike tune.”
During the course of World War II (1939-1945) the Germans invaded Paris and occupied the northern and western parts of France from 1940-44. The rest of the country was under the authority of the puppet government of Vichy led by Marshal Pétain and supported by much of the traditional French right. Simultaneously, General Charles de Gaullewas organi...
Jean Anouilh’s Ring Around the Moon first appeared in France in 1947 where it was and still is entitled, L’nvitation au Chateau. The play is especially important because it marked a transition
Chris Semansky
A playwright and poet, Chris Semansky teaches literature and writing at Portland Community College. In the following essay he discusses the role of class conflict in Anouilh’sRing Around the Moon. Behind the thinner, lighter veil of Jean Anouilh’s charade, Ring Around the Moon,lies two sorts of class conflict. First, is the friction between the older aristocracy (“old money”) and the emerging and usurping industrialist bourgeoisie (“new money”). The second is the tension between both of these...
WHAT DO I READ NEXT?
1. Much Ado About Nothing, is a comedy by William Shakespeare, written about 1598-1599. Like Ring Around the Moon,this is another play of mistaken identities and happy couplings at play’s end. 2. As You Like It is a comedy by William Shakespeareand first printed in 1623. This is yet another of Shakespeare’s plays involving mistaken identities and an ending with a happy double marriage. 3. The Marx-Engels Reader is an anthology of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published in 19...
Liz Brent
Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, specializing in film studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in the history of American cinema. In the following essay, Brent discusses literary, biblical and mythological references in Anouilh’s play.
Anouilh, Jean, Ring Around the Moon, translated by Christopher Fry, Oxford UniversityPress, 1950. Archer, Marguerite, Jean Anouilh, Columbia UniversityPress, 1971. Della Fazia, Alba, Jean Anouilh,Twayne, 1969. Falb, Lewis W., Jean Anouilh,Frederick Ungar, 1977. Mclntyre, H. G., The Theatre of Jean Anouilh,Barnes and Noble, 1981. Pronko, Leonard Cab...
Chiari, Joseph, The Contemporary French Theatre: The Flight from Naturalism,Macmillan, 1959. Curtis, Anthony, New Developments in the French Theatre,Curtain Press, 1948. Grossvogel, David I., The Self-Conscious Stage in Modern French Drama, Columbia UniversityPress, 1958. Kuritz, Paul, The Making of Theatre History,Prentice Hall, 1988.
Ring Round the Moon by Jean Anouilh | Goodreads. Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to read. Buy on Amazon. Rate this book. Ring Round the Moon. Jean Anouilh, Christopher Fry (translator) 3.69. 100 ratings9 reviews. NYTs Brooks Atkinson called it a work "of many moods... wistfully romantic, satirical, fantastic..."
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Geraldine Capulat. Capulat is, as Anouilh describes her, Madame Desmermortes’s ‘‘faded’’ servant/companion. She has a minor role until she is recognized by Isabelle’s mother as a long-lost friend...
