The Freaks of Mayfair

Sir Louis and Lady Mary Marigold are happy. They have a house in Mayfair, connections to aristocrats, and a standing in society that they have engineered through years of careful snobbery. They are, in short, freaks and they don't know it. E.F. Benson, the creator of Mapp and Lucia, turns his satirical eye on Edwardian London's upper crust, introducing a parade of characters whose obsessions with lineage, titles, and social hierarchy have rendered them genuinely bizarre. The comedy emerges from Benson's deadly accuracy: these people take themselves utterly seriously while pursuing goals that any outsider can see are absurd. The Marigolds fret over whether their dinner guests are sufficiently grand. Other characters scheme and climb and perform their status for an audience equally obsessed with the performance. It's sharp, it's funny, and it leaves you wondering which of your own preoccupations would seem equally ridiculous to someone watching from the outside. Benson understood something essential about the English and their class system: the joke is always on the ones who think they're winning.