her first role since her Academy Award for "Darling"
also staffing
Directed by IF
AN ENTERPRISE-VINEYARD FILM PRODUCTION TECHNICOLOR® CYRILCUSACK-ANTON DIFFRING - JEREMY SPENSER ALEX SCOTT FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT and JEAN-LOWS RICHARD • RAY BRADBURY • LEWIS M. ALLEN Francois UNIVERSAL-INTERNATIONAL RELEASE rancois Truffaut Leicester THEATRE 417152
PROGRAMMES AT 1-10, 3.15, 5-45, 8-15 SUNDAYS 3-15, 5-45, 8-15
winner of the New York Critics' Best Actor Award
• The Frenchman who refused to sell me a copy of the text—on the grounds that 'a playwright so little loved in France' certainly ought not to be available in London—had a fastidious curl to his lip, suggesting not so much moral or politi- cal disapproval as a much more radical aesthetic contempt.
And yet it is the French, and not the English, who thirst insatiably for this kind of play. The drame a these is based on the sort of simple notion (in this case, that generals plotting war behave like children at a nursery tea-party) a leader-writer might idly toy with, as frippery ornament or light relief from more serious ploys. Busy men at dinner parties often suggest similar conceits to be 'worked up' into a play by anyone with more time to waste than themselves. But it is in the nature of a these that it is in- capable of development, except on the crudest journalistic level (which is why it makes excellent reviews and execrable plays). Its appeal for a nation of conversationalists is precisely what makes the form so peculiarly unsuited to the stage. Shorn of the twists and felicities a speaker might imPart, the whole shrivels and evaporates on the slightest contact with reality—even if only with flesh-and-blood actors.
In the hands of an author of limited intelli- gence and less imagination, the result is catastrophic : Vian has no notion how generals behave, nor children for that matter, and nothing to add in two hours to a conceit whose triteness is apparent after two minutes. Actors faced with this kind of text either stress the playwright's poverty by the richness of their acting, or, as in the present production, are contaminated and sink to the play's own level of garish crudity. The Traverse generals—Richard Murdoch un- happily among them—lumber round the stage, cracking jokes with no conviction, strident, list- less and embarrassed, 'boring the knickers off us,' as Simon Watson Taylor's extraordinarily ham-fisted translation has it. Let us hope this may be a dreadful warning to directors: however far demand exceeds supply, however much you may be tempted, scraping the bottom of the barrel for new plays .can only blunt and deaden actors, discourage audiences, and drive any writer of even moderate sensibility, who might otherwise have tried his hand at a play, screaming from the theatre.
HILARY SPURLING
OPERA
Home-Grown
wo current revivals at our subsidised opera -I houses are performed with such talent and so sanely designed and produced as to make the opera-loving taxpayer disposed to pay up and look pleasant for a change.-Verdi's Simone Boc- canegra is back at Covent Garden, The Rake's Progress (Stravinsky) at Sadler's Wells. Both sent me home in that state of glow and undiscriminat- ing approval we all live for—even critics, so help me.
' In prospect Boccanegra had looked a bit dicey. The great Gobbi who, when this production first came up last December, sang the Doge (produc- ing it as well), is out of the present series with bronchitis. To say that John Shaw stepped into Uobbi's shoes would give a wrong idea. He had benefited during the first run from Gobbi's in- comparable coaching. That is well known. But in stride and glance, in impact of tone as much as in fall of forelock, his Doge was of a wholly dif- ferent breed from that of his mentor. The central and concentrated test for any Doge is in the Coun-
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