CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THEATRE
1" Amphitryon " and Les Fourberics de Scapin." (St. James's Theatre.) FOR most people the evening was a tribute to Christian Berard, who designed costumes and settings for both plays ; and, since the big books of the future will represent them lifelessly and still, I had better record our gratitude for their loveliness in space and motion.
Amphitryon, a jocose trifle, Berard adorns with what might be called a straight face. He shows us a giant perspective tunnel of symmetrical clouds, arcading away to an infinitely distant disc of blue. • When the action touches earth, when Jupiter has become Amphitryon and Mercury Sosie, rows of slim pillars intrude between the cumuli, and Berard has made ancient Greece out of his simple heavens. But the designs had been flimsily executed ; they flapped shoddily; one looked for les Brixton nues ; and they had been haphazardly lit—the snow-blue of Berard's clouds was grey, the snow-white of the pillars had curdled. This visit of the Renaud- Barrault company has emphatically demonstrated how far France lags behind us in the matter of scene-building: their settings have a way of seeming to have been run up out of cheese-cloth and paper-clips.
• Amphitryon is Moliere at his least accessible—as court jester to Louis XIV—and M. Barrault's production lends it wit only when Mme. Renaud's Alcmene is about. Bewildered, yet immensely cognizant, smiling like a child and positively winking with her hands (which she uses as lesser women use eyelashes), Mme. Renaud moves across the stage as if driven by sporadic puffs of wind. It is a tasty undulation.
j After Scapin—which more than fulfilled expectations—I found myself wondering, quite maliciously, where those people who had raised rapturous hands over the " stylisation " of Les Fausses Confidences were going to find words for this, the real thing. Jouvet directed it, and it is full of all that we cannot do : it is artifice with conviction and a heart, so that you wish it hours longer. Berard's set is, at first glance, shocking: no exquisiteness, no frivolity, but simply two grey flights of stone steps—equipped with modern hand- rails—and a square courtyard between them. At each side of the stage grey banners hang, with water-colour windows lightly sketched thereon. A drab enough vista in spite of a splash or two of pink. But against it how round and real the actors look ! How Berard lets them dominate us! This piece of scenery is, for my traveller's allowance, his masterpiece.
The performance, apart from a tendency, shared by most French productions of classical comedy, towards falsetto hooting when expressing pain or surprise in the aged, is perfect. M. Barrault, ideally cast, is at his rare best as Scapin, combining the nose-wiping leers of a guttersnipe with the explicit grace of a show-horse. He has, for our memories, an inspired moment when, in the middle of a vital piece of dialogue, he starts to eye an imaginary piece of rubbish at his feet ; then kicks it across the stage, follows it, watches it curiously over his shoulder as he talks ; picks it up, kneads it between finger and thumb, and finally whisks it into the wings with a back flip of his foot—whilst, all the time, miraculously keeping our attention focused on what he is saying.
The play's young people are unavoidably outshone by Messrs. Charles Mahieu and Pierre Bertin, in the juicy character parts of their fathers. Both are continuously funny—the one an elderly baby, to whom the world is a patient nursery, and the other a cramped and bandy gargoyle of avarice—and both preserve, throughout whatever cruel horseplay, a dignity at once intent and unbroken. Between them these two actors did much to restore my flagging faith in the theory about old men and banana-skins. '
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