The Figaro Plays

The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro and The Guilty Mother were the first plays to use a set of recurring characters who develop over time. They chronicle the slide of the ancien regime into revolution and Figaro was seen as a threat to the establishment. The impertinent, bustling servant was appropriated by Mozart and Rossini for their own purposes, and Beaumarchais became eighteenth-century France's only truly international theatre star.