Ardèle ou la Marguerite is a 1948 play by French dramatist Jean Anouilh. It was the first of his self-styled pièces grinçantes - ie, 'grating' black comedies liable to set an audience's teeth on edge.
Set in 1912 "or thereabouts", it concerns a family conference convened by the ageing General Léon Saint-Pé to discuss a romance entered into by his hunchbacked sister Ardèle. His other sister Liliane, a Countess, is accompanied by her husband Gaston (the Count) and her lover, Hector de Villardieu. All of them, especially the Countess, are scandalised by Ardèle's supposedly inappropriate passion for a fellow hunchback who has been engaged as tutor to the General's small son. Their self-interested entreaties to her are communicated through her bedroom door, behind which she has locked herself and embarked on a three-day hunger-strike. The action culminates in the General's insane and apparently bed-ridden wife, Amélie, erupting from her room at dead of night while Ardèle and her lover (neither of whom is ever properly seen) take drastic action.
The play was first presented in Paris at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées on 4 November 1948; directed by Roland Piétri and designed by Jean-Denis Malclès, it starred, as the General, Claude Sainval (the theatre's artistic director) with Mary Morgan as the Countess and Jacques Castelot as the Count. (Because it was a relatively short play by Anouilh's standards, it was staged with a brief 'curtain-raiser' in the form of Anouilh's semi-autobiographical vignette Episode de la vie d'un auteur.) Paris revivals followed in 1958 and 1979.
On Broadway, the play failed utterly in a production at the Mansfield Theatre directed by Martin Ritt, with set and costumes designed by Cecil Beaton; translator Cecil Robson changed the title to Cry of the Peacock in reference to Amélie's repeated, bird-like cries of "Léon!" Opening on 11 April 1950, it closed on the 12th. The cast included Raymond Lovell as the General with Oscar Karlweis and Lili Darvas as the Count and Countess.
It fared far better in Britain, where it premiered (in a version by Anouilh's regular translator, Lucienne Hill) at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 24 October 1950. "As a piece of theatre," commented the Birmingham Post, "Ardèle takes the stage with the insistent assurance of high tragedy. Anouilh is a master of his craft." Hailed in the News Chronicle as "this brilliant and terrifying play," it reached the West End a year later in a production at the Vaudeville Theatre directed by Anthony Pelissier. Among the cast were George Relph (the General), Isabel Jeans (the Countess), Ronald Squire (the Count) and Nicholas Phipps (Villardieu); Patrick Macnee also appeared. A short-lived revival at the Queen's Theatre in 1975, directed by Frith Banbury, starred Charles Gray as the General, the recently married Vincent Price and Coral Browne as the Count and Countess, and Allan Cuthbertson as Villardieu.
Anouilh later developed the characters of the General and his wife in La Valse des toréadors (The Waltz of the Toreadors), which opened at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in January 1952.