A comedy by Jean-Pierre Martinez
Translation by the author
Seeking to escape the stress of Parisian life, Adam and Eve moved to an old farmhouse where they set up a bed and breakfast, to break the isolation and make ends meet. But their first couple of guests arrive, and they will soon discover that in this little corner of paradise, hell is other people…
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The song from the play. Lyrics and music Jean-Pierre Martinez. This song may be used as part of a stage production, simple request to the author and without any additional fees. The audio file is available upon request, subject to prior authorization from the author for the use of the play’s text.
Hell Is Other Guests…
Alban and Ève have left Paris to settle on an isolated farm, where they open a bed and breakfast. The arrival of their first guests, Jacques and Bernadette, a seemingly perfectly harmless couple of pilgrims, is nevertheless enough to disturb their peace. An object glimpsed inside a bag, a few unlikely stories and some ambiguous behaviour soon begin to arouse suspicion.
The comedy is driven by a strictly mutual mistrust. Alban and Ève watch their guests and interpret the slightest detail as a cause for concern; but Jacques and Bernadette view their hosts in exactly the same way. The two couples thus become distorted reflections of one another: each believes they have detected something strange in the others while remaining blind to the equivalent oddities in themselves. Beneath the conventions of hospitality, marital resentments, prejudices, fantasies and each character’s own little eccentricities gradually come to the surface.
When Jacques and Bernadette reveal themselves to be “mystery guests”, visiting incognito to assess the quality of the hospitality, the balance suddenly shifts: those who were being watched become the observers. Yet far from dispelling suspicion, this explanation keeps the uncertainty alive until the very end as to what is real, invented or simply imagined. Beneath the surface of an exuberant character comedy, Bed and Breakfast thus shows how much our fear of others is fuelled by our own projections. The rural paradise Alban and Ève dreamed of gradually becomes a place where everyone ends up revealing more about themselves than about those they claim to be judging.