Overview

In a rambling apartment, a middle-aged couple, Yvonne and Georges, live with their 22-year old son Michael. When Michael declares his love for a girl, his devoted mother burns with jealousy while his father is shocked to discover that his son's lover is someone he knows only too well. The original production scandalised Paris and this steamy hot-house of a play still seems shocking today. Written in eight opium-sodden days, Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles is a frank, ironic, bruisingly melodramatic play dealing with incest and the diseased love from which it stems. Jeremy Sam's darkly witty and razor sharp translation was first seen at the National Theatre in 1994.