ARTS & AMUSEMENTS

In Search of a Hero

• By ADRIAN BRINE

MALRAUX has made the outsides of the French theatres shine. Formerly soot- caked, the Odeon, the Opera and the Comedie - Frangaise now wear the yellow stone of an Oxford college and dazzle the imagination by suggesting the magnificence of the age and the vaulting ambitions of the men who commissioned and designed them. Gaullism has produced no one to make the events inside rival the facades.

At the Comedie Francaise. Jacques Charon's production of Cyrano de Bergerac is enjoying a similar success to Olivier's Othello in London in terms of reputation and box-office success. Charon suggests that this is because audiences are tiring of mud, poverty and incoherence: they want romance to buoy them up and a hero to admire. Cyrano does have certain affinities with de Gaulle and de Gaulle in fact held him as a boyhood hero; but apart from Henri Tisot's wicked imitation of the President in the inter- val of a Feydeau play he is starring in—where it is not altogether relevant—this is the only manifestation of Gaullism in the theatre.

The rest of the playhouses are providing few heroes and precious little. to buoy up anybody's spirits. France has no senior actors in the G ielgud- Olivier class; only actress to approach Edith Evans or Sybil Thorndike; no theatre revolution- aries like Joan Littlewood; and to my know- ledge, only one brilliant director in his thirties— Antoine Bourseiller (currently collaborating with Barrault on an adaptation of Kafka's America)., Apart from the stable cabaret artists and adultery comedies, the bills on .the kiosk an- nounce translations from England, Anieric'a, Germany. Zeffirelli's production of Who's Afraid= of Virginia Woolf? is enjoying the highest acclaim from critics and spectators. But whoever the young French dramatists are, they are not being heard.

Perhaps this is because the very acting traditions which are the bastions of classical act- ing make actors surprisingly unable to interpret more modern, interior kinds of drama. French theatre has always been an author's, theatre: from Racine's day to Ionesco's and Monther- lant's, playgoers have gone to listen to a text spoken. But in this very attempt to be faithful to the author, there is already a betrayal. An actor can be too self-effacing. English actors, in comparison, are either personality actors or character actors. The chameleon changeability and animal energy of Olivier is far outside the range of any contemporary French actor; and the pageant of psychological imagination and theatricality that make tni a Tyrone Guthrie pro- duction would dazzle and astound the French. Paradoxically, French acting is very much a matter of technique, yet a French actor speaks of `playing a character part' as he might speak of taking a rare and slightly distasteful medicine.

In brief, there is less of the acting that goes on between the lines. (When The Caretaker was first produced, it was given with a curtain-raiser by a French writer, so for reasons of time the pauses were eliminated!) Dialogue that expresses everything but explains nothing—the suggestive commonplaces of Chekhov, the dotty heart- broken cliches of Pinter's characters—are alien to a Cartesian mind, and indigestible to actors whose principal organ is the voice. And yet, the most interesting play I have seen lately in Paris is the work of an author who—misleading though comparisons may be—combines some of the qualities of both Pinter and Chekhov.

Nor is this a new play. Roland Dubillard's Naives Hirondelles has a history that recalls The Birthday Party's. first presented in 1960 by a small company of actors, including the author himself and the producer, the play was so un- justly execrated and misunderstood that Andre Roussin felt compelled to write in the Figaro an exhortation to playgoers to see it. Last year the same production was revived, with the original cast, to enormous critical acclaim.' It is running still, crowned with the same laurels.

Its four lonely eccentric dreamers are played at once explicitly and suggestively by Tania Balachova, peroxided and pretentiously bour- geoise, her high heels twisting over as she talks of her dreams; the author himself, a rasping shaggy lion of a man; the producer, Arlette Reinerg, a waif with the eyes and cheekbones of a woman in .Munch's The Cry; and a young actor called Bernard Fresson, who looks like a blond rugger captain and acts with the same lack of artifice, identifying himself with the situa- tion as completely as Tom Courtenay does. This is the definitive production of a small master- piece. The play's mixture of comedy that is sad without being sentimental, its picture of provincial boredom in a way that is never boring, its characters' dreaminess which expresses itself through concrete objects—set it apart from any other movements in the French theatre.

If trends must be charted, Monsieur Charon is probably right in assuming that playgoers are looking for a hero. Or perhaps—since the direction the theatre takes is guided by the dominant personalities who run it—leading actors are finding important roles to play (a problem which defies our first-class English actors, with the exception of Olivier and Scofield). Whatever the reasons, the other rewarding evenings in the French theatre are the result of the encounter between a major player and a major role.

Jean-Louis Barrault has lately selected more and more plays for his repertoire at the Odeon, which explore the problems of modern women, as well as giving opportunities for the prodigious talents of Madeleine Renaud : Happy Days, The Dark Is Light Enough, and lately Francois Billetdoux's newest play, II Faut-Passer par les Nuages. The heroine, Claire Pouldu, is an elderly woman who, having risen from the gutter, attained, by hard work, enormous worldly power and wealth. Her sons have grown up in her shadow, personally dependent on her, even in their forties, and owing their important positions in business to her influence. She realises this unhealthy dependence at the same time as the burial of her first lover—her opposite in every way, the grasshopper to her ant—brings on a nostalgia for him and his way of life. She sells up everything: her children are forced to

realise their own identities, and she is brought to a new understanding of herself. `Pour arriver, aux regions de la lumiere, it faut passer par les nuages. Les uns s'arretent la; mais d'autres savent passer outre.'

The play puts an alley cat among the pigeons of an acquisitive status-conscious society. But

however interesting the theme, the author's realisation of it is overwhelmingly literary. It looks like a very good adaptation from a novel. A series of episodic scenes, divided by characters who explain themselves to the audience or to the confessional grill, it has been produced, by Barrault, in the only way possible: whole rooms are created by a single window hanging against the skycloth ; and when Mme Pouldu gives up everything, and all the decor is whisked away, leaving only a frail elderly woman, alone against the sky, in the middle of a huge sloping stage, one is inevitably reminded of Barrault's saying, in Reflexions sur le Theatre, that drama is a concerto for man in space. Barrault wants his theatre, set in the Latin Quarter, to be the theatre of youth, but its new play, and consequently its new production, looks irretrievably old- fashioned. Yet Mme Renaud is one of those rare players in whom all the phases of a woman's life appear to be telescoped : at once girlish and frail with age, an adolescent in love and a grown- up man's mother, here she plays a part she merits.

Another public figure seeking privacy is Pro- fessor Robert Oppenheimer. At the Athenee, Jean Vilar is presenting his own dramatisation of Oppenheimer's trial (or 'Inquiry,' as his prosecutor prefers to call it), which examined the Professor's suitability to continue directing Los Alamos;

Piscator's production of the German play by Heinar Kipphardt, on which Vilar's version is based, was decorated with filmed flash-backs of Oppenheimer's life, of the H-bomb and its consequences, and of the interior monologues of the judges, counsel and witnesses. Vilar's pro- duction is infinitely more austere, more homo- geneous and more interesting. Acted apparently without artifice, it is so minutely regulated that every small exchange of looks between members of the inquiry, every nervous shifting of a chair, become significant. Vilar has ever been the apostle of simplicity and intelligence, and the enemy of theatricality for its own sake (he once said he' never went to the theatre); he replaces stylisation and cliché by a truthful examination of human conduct, and a dramatic inquiry into moral problems. In the performances he has drawn from the cast, he secretly reveals what a great director he is, and his own performance of Oppenheimer suggests that he is the finest French actor of his time.