Mixed International Fare At the 'Theater des Nations'
LOTTMAN, HERBERT
On STAGE By Herbert Lottman Mixed International Fare At the Theatre des Nations' Paris London Theater Critics had to cross the Channel early this month in order to attend the world premiere...
...Another American contribution was to have been a Negro college group from Atlanta, doing a panorama of Negro spirituals, but no one seemed to have found the way to pay the fare for its ocean voyage...
...Only last-minute financial backing made it possible for New York's Living Theater company to journey to Paris...
...Moreover, church ritual requires the patience of the believer, and Luther runs for three long hours...
...And The Glass Menagerie was translated into French and produced on a Paris stage 14 years ago...
...The Living Theater was hailed as the "great victor of the 1961 season," and the judgment was confirmed when a special prize for experimental theater was created and awarded to the New York group for its Paris performances...
...Osborne's treatment approached sublimity at moments, but he did not know how to hold on to it...
...The American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), subsidized by the State Department, came to Paris with reheated versions of Thorton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth and Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie...
...But Luther was at least new and untested, and thus provided some excitement for the audience at the Théàtre des Nations...
...Then followed two evenings of William Carlos Williams' Many Loves, and the final offering of the Living Theater repertory, Brecht's early play, In the Jungle of Cities...
...The evening I saw The Connection the number of nonAmericans in the capacity audience could have been seated in a single row...
...Like the TNP, Luther exploits the mystery of ceremony and pageant, but it confuses it with the magic of the theater, and we are never quite sure to which we are responding, or are expected to respond...
...The Living Theater's The Connection, by Jack Gelber, was a revelation to young theater people here...
...The historical drama was the highlight of this year's Theatre des Nations, the French Capital's annual international theater festival...
...Most important, without Finney or Peter Bull—playing Tetzel, an evil priest who sells the indulgences which are to bring on Luther's famous theses and cause his break with the Roman Church—there would have been no play...
...What is wrong with the new Osborne...
...It puzzled and shocked the good bourgeoisie by leading them for the first time into a world of degenerates and dope addicts, with Beat argot to heighten the strangeness of it all...
...Some French critics compared the Tony Richardson production to the work of the superb French Theatre National Populaire (TNP), a state-subsidized group which almost always outdistances the Comedie Francaise...
...The U.S.'s good name was saved this year by an off-Broadway group that honored its festival booking by the skin of its teeth...
...What the critics saw on the opening night, July 6, was a religio-historical pageant, following the events of Luther's life in chronological order, somewhat reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and even more so of Bertold Brecht's Galileo (which the British, and presumably John Osborne, had a chance to see in London recently...
...Apparently, international theater festivals do not always mean cultural exchange...
...Only in Luther's monologues, sermons and tirades did the play seem to realize its dramatic potential...
...Le Monde's drama critic, looking for a neat metaphor to sum up the ANTA contribution, concluded: "In gastronomy we would speak of the blue plate special...
...On STAGE By Herbert Lottman Mixed International Fare At the Theatre des Nations' Paris London Theater Critics had to cross the Channel early this month in order to attend the world premiere of John Osborne's new play, Luther...
...A provincial dialect was not inappropriate, however, for Osborne's Luther is the son of a miner, a man of vulgar earthiness...
...Herbert Lottman, an American now living in Paris, is a close observer of the European cultural scene...
...The official United States contribution to this year's festival, on the other hand, elicited no excitement of any kind...
...In the scenes without these actors, the power seems to leak out of the language...
...Luther was performed in the special regional English of the industrial north used by Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the film which established his reputation as an actor...
...Not only had Skin of Our Teeth been here before, but it actually had been presented at a previous Paris festival...
...The brilliant acting of Albert Finney in the title role, which earned him the best actor award at the festival, helped save Osborne's disappointing text...
...Never before seen in Paris, In the jungle of Cities was acclaimed by Le Monde as itself justifying an international theater festival...
...It was performed by the English Stage Company of the Royal Court Theater, the same group which first produced Osborne's Look Back in Anger, as well as the early plays of Harold Pinter, Shelagh Delaney and Arnold Wesker...
...The ANTA company was ignored when the awards were given out on July 7.) If it accomplishes nothing else, the Théâtre des Nations at least satisfies the appetites of Paris' various foreign colonies...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 29
