The Beau's Lesson / School for Bros

Two versions of Marivaux's Le Petit Maître Corrigé (1734). The first a faithful translation (The Beau's Lesson) and the second a modern adaptation (School for Bros).

"A forgotten gem... one of the Marivaux plays that have stood the test of time." (Financial Times)

"Ranks with the other, better known works of the master of games of love and chance... [but] something more serious seems to be going on in this play, whose austerity of plot and denseness of dialogue suggest the author's desire to touch a deep, hard core." (Le Monde)

This charming psychological comedy was produced by the Comédie Française in 2017 after nearly 300 years of neglect -- to such acclaim that the run was extended into 2018, a film of it made and the play remounted in the 2023 season.

Now English-speaking readers can appreciate this new-found classic for themselves, both in a faithful yet supple translation that captures all of Marivaux's characteristic nuance, charm and playfulness, and in a modern adaptation that puts affluent California tech culture to a satirical test.

"Excellent new translation. . . . Weber appreciates the playful qualities of the source material, especially the fast tonal and tactical shifts employed by the characters. . . . The linguistic register offers a nice balance of historical and contemporary. Diction suggests historical distance, but vocabulary is not archaic. . . . Weber has a good ear for this temporal back-and-forth. . . . Character voice is a definite strength of this translation. . . . With its fortuitous turns of phrase, elegance of style, and clarity of character voices, Tom Weber's translation is a welcome addition to the canon of Marivaux plays in English." (The Mercurian, The Theatre Translation Review)

The plays of Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763) have become, after Molière's, the most performed comedies on the French stage. Marivaux also wrote, though left unfinished, two ground-breaking novels.

The author of this translation, The Beau's Lesson, is Tom Weber, is a playwright and professional translator whose translations have been filmed in Hollywood and produced on stages in the U.S. and France. The modern comedy, School for Bros, is a joint creation with Benno Nelson, a Chicago playwright, director, comic and dramaturg.