Sartre: The Rigged World

...They wrote the play that Dumas merely polished up and signed...

...The Devil and the Good Lord is a refreshing, challenging play...

...He is challenged by another traitor, Heinrich, the priest, born of the people and yet, because of his allegiance to the church, the betrayer of the people, who explains to Goetz that to do evil is natural, easy and common to all men...

...These later plays are lusty and alive, broader in range, freer and more audacious than the early ones...

...As a character, Kean was made to measure for Sartre...

...He thereby perpetrates an evil more deadly than when challenging God...

...But there is something else which is rather more disconcerting...

...The Pirandellian theme of impersonation could hardly be pushed further...

...Into this situation, at a desperate moment, when no new "angle" is forthcoming, drops Valera, an adventurer, at the very moment when Nekrassov, a Russian minister of state, has temporarily disappeared...

...Sartre may well have benefited, as did Giraudoux, from Jouvet's sense of staging...

...In comparison the best of his previous heroes—Orestes, Hugo and Hoederer—seem artificial and lifeless...

...a reading of Luther merged with a thorough dislike for the metaphysics in Claudel's Satin Slipper...

...Rigged too is Goetz's path, the conflicts that oppose him to Heinrich, the satanic priest, or Nasty, the peasant leader...

...With these vivid outsize characters Sartre, as playwright, has come into his own...

...Sartre's Goetz is an impersonator...

...His acts are determined from outside for the benefit of God—an absolute being looking down at him from the "eternal elsewhere...

...The ensuing complications, denunciations and betrayals carry along with them a wonderful parody of political and journalistic lingo, attitudes and methods which strike home every time, perhaps too directly for comfort...

...Reviewed by Germaine Bree Author, "Albert Camus: Biography and Critical Study" THE TWO OTHER PLAYS included in this volume with The Devil and the Good Lord (1951) are Kean (1953) and Nekrassov (1955...

...A sham Lucifer who finally calls his own bluff, Goetz seems to have evolved in Sartre's fertile imagination as a consequence of a journey to Equatorial Africa...

...Kean's turbulent egotism, the double ambiguity of his relation with the aristocratic admirers of the actor who despise the man...

...The setting is Paris in the mid-1950s, the pretext a small local election, the dilemmas, the minute, highly inflated and dangerous dilemmas of a tabloid...

...Valera, impersonating Nekrassov, starts a series of "behind the Iron Curtain" stories...

...Goetz, a bastard, a mercenary leader of armed bands, stands poised with his army outside Worms, which he is preparing to sack...

...his semi-comical, semi-melodramatic recovery of his "self" from among his many on-and-off stage impersonations, are good dramatic materials well-handled and not weighted down by didactic intentions...

...As a playwright Sartre clearly benefited, in this instance, from the techniques of the "well-made" play...

...This makes of Sartre himself a Sartrian "traitor-hero" and paradoxically enough it is the saving grace in a theater which otherwise might bog down in tiresome didacticism...

...Perhaps Sartre's growing mastery of his medium is due in part to Louis Jouvet, who so stubbornly worked with him to reduce The Devil and the Good Lord to manageable proportions...

...Everywhere," Sartre wrote, "the role is there, waiting for its man," for each "accidental" individual only too eager to get rid of himself, to step into the trap, to become "someone else...

...Frederick Lemaitre, the great Romantic actor, played Kean performing Shakespeare and was bettered when Brasseur played Frederick Lemaitre playing Kean, etc...

...Sartre has struggled all his life to give the notion of freedom a practical, efficacious content...

...The Devil and the Good Lord, with its great crowds, its bellicose language and sweeping dynamism, deals with a modern Lucifer, rather than with a Faust...

...Valera, impersonating Nekrassov, picks up a part all ready-made and prepared for him, a part determined by passions, ambitions, calculations and hatred—not of the Russians—but of the French bankers, political figures, and journalists themselves...

...a chance remark of Jean-Louis Barrault's about a Cervantes play...

...The very history of Dumas' play, which Sartre adapted, has a Sartrian ring to it...

...This is the price he pays to become a man, a certain man...

...He is lucky too in his translators who seem very much at home with his vigorous, truculent language...

...The existentialist lesson is not troublesome...

...Eventually, Sartrian hero that he is, he must admit his imposture, recognize that there was no absolute, no eye of God to coerce him, that he had freely "played" his freely chosen parts...

...The romantico-existentialist Kean is a quite striking and effective character who palls on us a little only toward the last act...

...From Cervantes came the idea of the man who, unable to choose for himself between good and evil, plays each choice with dice...

...But it is surely Nekrassov which reveals the real stuff of Sartre's talent...

...Just as Sartre claimed, it is an Aristophanes-like farce, dealing in actualities and personalities with a peculiar combination of good-humored directness and pertinent ferocity...

...What it challenges is "what has served us as our alibi" for so long, our claim to a personal relation with and a participation in the absolute...

...Goetz, the military leader, ready to speak as man to other men and to lead the peasant revolt, an act this time and not a gesture...

...The "traitor" then is on the way to becoming a man...

...As a playwright, in spite of his uncontrolled wordiness and love of improvisations, he has no equal in France today...

...He is at least honest with himself and consistent...

...Goetz, Kean and Nekrassov—traitors, impersonators, impostors, all three...

...Sartre is mercilessly spoofing a McCarthyite type of political sensationalism, commercially condemmed forever to goad a jaded public opinion afresh by increasingly dire revelations of alleged Russian-inspired plots...

...The social lesson comes rather patly which is why—no doubt in order to hold our attention—Sartre deplovs the full force of his turbulent imagination and rhetoric...

...One may question his commitments, the strange paradoxes into which—unabashed intellectual — he precipitates himself...

...Kean, playing Richard III in Paris, in 1828, drinking himself into a stupor at the Cafe Anglais, while impatient audiences waited for his appearance on the stage, had caught the fancy of two minor dramatists...

...What he eventually comes to realize is that he is an empty figure, a mere tool for the people he had intended to exploit...

...Kean moves fast, through wildly improbable but dramatically logical imbroglio and amusing repartee...

...Impersonation, in Sartre's eyes, defines most people unless, of course, "turning traitors," they "give away the game," unmasking the shameless alibis and doubledealing shams around them...

...Of course, Sartre's play is rigged to transmit his point of view, an open, unashamed atheism...

...He will force God's approval...

...Devil and good Lord in the play are alibis covering up the truth, invented to justify, forgive and bear the weight of responsibilities eschewed...

...Besides a desire for social vengeance, what drives him is the image he has set up of himself: Goetz, challenger of God...

...He is the Sartrian "hero par excellence," a man in search of his elusive identity...

...He is led eventually to kill the priest and save the peasant...

...Controversial, aggressive, deliberately and sometimes heavy-handedly didactic and "committed...

...he too is running away from "gestures" in search of "acts," uncomfortably aware of that "someone else" beside him, always ready to "steal" his own existence from him...

...Only in the 1950s, with five plays already behind him, was Sartre able to create a type of character which fully embodied his point of view and brought into play his basic themes...

...He has betrayed and killed his brother and the nobility to which he only half belongs...

...an impersonator in a "rigged world...

...from Luther, the "Peasant's Revolt" setting in the early Renaissance, and the religious revolt against a certain metaphysical order, which allowed Sartre to transpose in Renaissance terms the African theme of revolt against oppression ; from Claudel, the broad dimensions of his stage and, by contrast, a thoroughly anti-Claudelian concept of character, human bonds, event and destiny...

...Except for his very recent Seques-tres d'Altona ("The Self-sequestered Prisoners of Altona"), all Sartre's theater is now available in English translation...

...The "existential" lesson, to be sure, is there...

...It is fairly clear in Le Diable et le bon Dieu, unequivocally clear in Nekrassov, that today freedom for him, at least temporarily, means freedom committed in one political direction only, the direction which he judges to be the most efficacious historically, the Marxist, which must sweep us towards the advent of a great, classless human society...

...Goetz then chooses a new role for himself: He will be a Saint...

...Sartre, curiously enough, is sincere...

...His stature as dramatist gains thereby immeasurably...