Editing Marcel Achard (section)

==Career peak in the interwar period==
Achard's greatest successes and popularity were in the period between the two World Wars when contemporary critics favorably compared him to some of his renowned French predecessors such as [[Pierre de Marivaux]] and [[Alfred de Musset]]. Postwar pundits were not as kind, pointing out the rather narrow scope of human psyche that he represented and deprecatingly referring to him as a "spécialiste de l'amour" ["love specialist"] for the sickly-sweet characteristics of his poetic imagination.

The critics focused, of course, on Achard's most popular plays, disregarding the fact that the reason Achard continued to write them is precisely because they met with such unvarying success. His less-well known works, however, show innovative techniques and original themes. 1929's ''La Belle Marinière''<ref name="Gp3"/> [''The Beautiful Lady of the Canals'' a/k/a ''The Beautiful Bargewoman''] still has some of the excessively-poetic dialogue, but is overall a realistic play about a love triangle involving a bargeman, his wife and his best friend and companion. Similarly, 1933's ''La femme en blanc'' [''The Woman in White''] uses a then-new technique of recreating for the audience events as they are being described by the play's characters. In 1938's ''Le corsaire'' [''The Privateer''], a "play-in-a-play" device, pioneered by [[Luigi Pirandello]], depicts film actors portraying the life of a long-ago pirate, finding themselves caught in an endless loop of similarities. The same year saw the production of his most controversial play, ''Adam'', which strove to give insight into the conflicted emotions of an unhappy [[homosexuality|homosexual]]. Although the very subject matter caused it to be considered scandalous at the time, its brief revival three decades later, in the open and radicalized culture of the late 1960s, when the author was approaching his 70th birthday, found the once-ahead-of-its-time work judged as a tame and dated period piece below Achard's usual literary standard.