Parisian Theatrics
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage PARISIAN THEATRICS BY LEO SAUVAGE As I made my way through the Left Bank to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—the current production of an English-language company that squeezed itself...
...Paris has been treated to several authentically American works by American authors, too...
...Sad to say, no important new plays of French origin appeared during the past season...
...Monotony and boredom—coupled with, yet unrelieved by, senseless acrobatics— are the main features of the new production of The Marriage, by Witold Gombrowicz...
...Staged by Daniel Benoin, director of a company based in the industrial city of Saint-Etienne, this adaptation deals with Mitchell as well as Scarlett O'Hara...
...In addition, it had two English-language productions, in 1852 and 1857, both starring Charlotte Cushman...
...There was nothing at all boring or monotonous about Wielopole-Wielo-pole, Tadeusz Kantor's surrealist masterpiece, acted in Polish at the Theatre de Paris by the author's Cricot 2 Theater, from Cracow...
...Angelo Mali-pieri has been sent to Padua to be its ruler...
...He then lived for long periods in Paris, where his tragedy Salome, written in French, was put on the boards in 1896 by the great director Lugne-Poe at the very same Theatre de L'Oeuvre...
...The Virginia Woolf has an excellent cast, headed by Ginny Gates as Martha...
...In this instance it is used to kill time and bureaucratic boredom...
...The action takes place in 1549, when Venice was a superpower tyrannizing the occupied neighboring city-states...
...One was Victor Hugo's Angelo, ty-ran de Padoue, first presented by the Comedie Frangaise in 1835...
...Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt...
...Alternating with Hugo's drama was Octave Mirbeau's Les affaires sont les affaires "Business is Business"), aplay that similarly speaks to the concerns of the present...
...What emerged, though, was a very American show using the same name...
...At least in recent memory...
...embassy and his secretary would survive in an office where they had nothing to do...
...While terrorizing the Paduans he is himself terrorized by a fear of the Venetian spy network, which permits him to "punish but not to forgive...
...This alliance between imagination and technique can only be called superb...
...On Stage PARISIAN THEATRICS BY LEO SAUVAGE As I made my way through the Left Bank to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—the current production of an English-language company that squeezed itself into a store there a few years ago—it occurred to me that France has had relatively little impact on the American theater...
...The central figure, an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer, thinks "there's only one thing which makes a people or an institution great, and that's money...
...The title refers to a game of wits played on paper, called "Battleships" by schoolchildren, who have long turned to it when a teacher has failed to hold their interest...
...I saw it at one of the city's few air-conditioned playhouses, the handsome Theatre Gemier, facing the Eiffel Tower, behind the Palais de Chaillot...
...But most Paris critics remained cold, and a number of them admitted that they could not help looking for Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable...
...The Theatre du Rond-Point—on the Avenue Franklin-Roosevelt, appropriately enough—devoted July to Galaxie USA, De Broadway a Hollywood, a hasty, superficial song-and-dance selection from the stage and screen...
...But this has not spared Edward Albee the wrath of the critic for a local English-language magazine who labeled him "the most overrated playwright of his generation...
...Jean Giraudoux was never a big name on Broadway, for example, although Harold Clurman staged many of his plays and Audrey Hepburn poured much youthful charm into the 1954 production of Ondine...
...The piece has now been rewritten by Raymond Gerome, who stars and directs as well...
...Jean-Louis Barrault has enthusiastically stressed the spectacular qualities of intrigue, the unexpected turns of events, and an extraordinary woman character called La Tisbe who is both passionate and strong (Sarah Bernhardt played her in 1905...
...Angelo, tyran de Padoue crossed the Atlantic a century ago and gave the great French actress Rachel one of her best roles during her 1855 tour...
...Brought to Paris in 1964 from Argentina, where the now-famous Polish writer had lived for more than 20 years, this bit of nonsense was published in Buenos Aires as El Casamiento but not performed...
...The audience around me enjoyed the play, and I myself did not dislike it...
...A majority of the spectators screamed their approval after the final performance...
...More startling or infuriating for 1903—and in retrospect amazing to us—is his rebellious daughter, who not only takes the servants' side against her father but champions women's rights...
...The United States also figures in a light-hearted little piece, Bataille novate, at the 246-seat Studio des Champs-Elysees...
...Meanwhile, the luxurious and equally large Marigny was host to a curious Franco-American experiment: the first theater treatment of Margaret Mitchell' s Gone With the Wind...
...It is based on a short-lived monologue by the American author-actor John Gay that was adapted for Rome's Teatro El-iseo in 1979 by Masolino d' Amico...
...According to his printed instructions, the characters are "always artificial...
...Indeed they are—and incomprehensible and soporific—in a faithfully stilted French text that droned on for three hours...
...For that reason alone, I doubt that this version of the bestseller and film could make it to (or on) Broadway...
...It was easy to guess at the meaning of the words because the magnificent cast translated it by tones, gestures and sudden silences...
...Gates, said the critic, "performs the exhausting role of Martha, the only role with more than one dimension that Albee ever created, better than it was written...
...I was happy to leave the cool building that Sunday and walk out into the sunlight, where real people were talking and real children were playing on the esplanade...
...Possibly Comrade Jaruzelski does not mind its virulent attacks against the Church, on the theory that they make him less contemptible by comparison...
...In 1882, nine years before the trial and conviction that sent Wilde to an English jail for two years, he lectured in the U.S...
...In building on material from both Scarlett's 1860s and Margaret's 1920s it introduces several harshly realistic moments into the book's romanticized notions of the South...
...Certain lines have much contemporary relevance, to wit: "In Venice, one is not killed, one disappears...
...Despite the success of The Lark, with Julie Harris, and of Becket, with Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, Jean Anouilh is mostly known in the U.S...
...The soldiers in this antimilitaristic play wear the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that may induce a certain complacency in a Polish Communist general...
...This, moreover, in a year notable mainly for the innovations of Sunday in the Park with George...
...Although the Gerome comedy starts like one of the lectures, it turns out to be much more, not least because France Delahalle appears in various female roles, including Mrs...
...and Canada...
...But before Galaxie USA took over the Theatre du Rond-Point, home of the Renaud-Barrault company, it housed two quite interesting revivals...
...Gombrowicz, who says The Marriage was inspired by Hamlet, admits that he reached the middle of the second act without knowing what he wanted to happen next...
...To add to the air of novelty, the adapter was Georges Soria, a writer and producer whose political ties are to the USSR, not the U.S...
...Bataille navale is a not very deep, yet not at all tiring comedy applicable to bureaucratic monotony anywhere...
...Apparently such an office, initially set up to recover and inventory valuable leftover World War II machinery, once did exist...
...as a provider of flops...
...The slogan coined in the title—still used in France, along with its internationally adopted English equivalent—was resented then, when it seemed much more biting, if no more cynical, than it does today...
...Gerome himself is a skillful performer...
...L'Extravagant Mister Wilde, a sharp, literate comedy presented at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, brings into focus the complex and unhappy Oscar Wilde...
...An extremely reactionary, pro-Royalist, somewhat anti-Semitic journalist at the beginning of the Third Republic, Mirbeau eventually became an ally of Emile Zola during the Dreyfus affair...
...I would not be surprised, however, to see another American work that has been reworked here return to New York...
...Strange as the persistent power of Hugo and Mirbeau may seem, perhaps the strangest influence I have observed in the theater here comes from Poland, via South America...
...After an earlier rejection, his an-tibourgeois polemic opened at the Comedie Franeaise in 1903...
...Now it is admired by every avant-gardist...
...Perhaps that is why—my own misgivings notwithstanding—it has not only been a popular hit but won the Tony Award for "Best Musical...
...Kantor obviously thinks the Poles can understand the Latin expression mutatis mutandis...
...Moon for the Misbegotten...
...The James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim attempt to recreate Georges Seurat's masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," is in my view a far more attractive illustration of Gallic influence on the American stage, even if its inspiration is a painting rather than some clever play...
...Earlier in the season, a 280-seat house in the formerly proletarian 13 th arron-dissement put on Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and one of the many suburban cultural centers presented...
...In any case, here on the other side of the ocean the Yankee theatrical presence is almost pervasive, albeit not always flattering...
...And who remembers that Edmond Rostand's late 19th-century Les Romanesques gave us the 9,000 off-Broadway performances of The Fantasticksl Granted, the 1983-84 New York season got off to an early start last August when La Cage awe Folles, originally a marginal boulevard comedy by Jean Poiret, opened at the Palace Theater...
...Pierre Dux, the first actor ever named as administrator of the 300-year-old national company, was the director and lead performer of the revival...
...Raised in Scotland, he studied at the Young Vic company's school in London and at one point was an aspiring Hollywood actor, so he would have no language problem in bringing his production to the United States...
...Nor have the repeated attempts to acclimate Moliere and naturalize Feydeau been noteworthy...
...I very much wonder how the rather nihilistic or at least unorthodox spirit of this cruel, often provocatively destructive farce can be tolerated in the Polish People's Republic...
...Helped by a perfect set from the brilliant designer Georges Wakhevitch, Dux has refined Mirbeau's declaration of class war, combining subtle humor and tragedy...
...Previously unknown playwright Jean L'Hote has tried to imagine how an attache at the U.S...
...Among more recent works, John Piel-meier' s Agnes was a revelation, and Patrick Meyer's K2 filled the 1,000 seats of the old Porte Saint-Martin—for this city, a big theater...
Vol. 67 • August 1984 • No. 14
