Indiscretions Summary / Study Guide

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Indiscretions | Introduction

Indiscretions is the English translation of Les Parents Terribles, by the French playwright and poet Jean Cocteau, which was written and first performed in 1938. The play is available as Les Parents Terribles (Indiscretions), translated into English by Jeremy Sams (1995). When it was first produced in Paris, the play scandalized audiences with its portrayal of diseased love infecting a bourgeois family in 1930s Paris, and it was subsequently banned from the publicly owned theater by the city authorities. It still retains its power to shock. In the play, Cocteau returns to the theme of incest, which he previously explored in the play La Machine Infernale, produced and published in 1934.

To show a young man’s attempts to escape the suffocating love of his mother, Indiscretions draws upon the ancient Greek story of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. While Cocteau’s play shares the tragic inevitability and melodrama of the Oedipus story, its elements of farce, sense of the absurd, and hilariously comic dialog cause the audience often to laugh at the most emotionally fraught moments.

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