1 NOVEMBER 1957, Page 20

The Outsider

The Egg. By Felicien Marceau. (Saville.)

M. MARcEnu's L'fEuf (together with Anouilh's Pauvre Bitos) was the outstanding success of last season's Paris theatre. It was witty, mildly obscene, brilliantly acted and sufficiently 'significant' (by which I mean it possessed that faint suggestion that it was no laughing matter which enables the French to laugh really heartily) —in fact it was a very skilfully compiled job indeed and in its native habitat, where it is still running, quite irresistible.

It concerns the efforts of a poor, sly, egocentric wisp to come to terms with middle-class French society which confronts him with the madden- ing blandness of an egg, encasing everyone but himself in warm womb-like comfort. He starts off thinking that if he could only find the system on which the thing works he would be all right, but discovers that there is no apparent system at all —the happy accidents and embarrassing misfor- tunes which befall him only betray an entire lack of coherence in the universe. He also dis- covers, perhaps not unnaturally, that the only state which combines happiness and necessity is that of a criminal who is, by nature, in society without being of it. He applies himself with macabre intelligence to his task and achieves a success which I suppose it would be unfair to disclose.

The form of this very suggestive (in every sense) charade is of a monologue by Emile Magis, the hero, interspersed with brief scenes sketching his rise from hardware assistant to minor civil ser- vant and his fall (if that is what it is) from un- sullied ingenu to adulterer, cuckold and murderer.

Mr. Charles Frank, the translator and producer of the English version, must have thought he was on to a good thing and if he has made disappoint- ingly little of it one must admit he had a horribly difficult job. Nigel Patrick, for all his charm, is hopelessly miscast as Emile—too big, too self- confident, too much like those English 'bounders' he has sometimes played so well in the past. There is the rub; how could one sell a play which is quite largely a matter of French manners to an English audience without making one's hero English? Mr. Frank has obviously decided to compromise. Mr. Patrick shall be English; the sets and most of the minor characters shall be French in the 'charm- ing' cardboard way one sees in small English films about honeymoons in Paris. He probably did not anticipate the disastrously distracting mixture of styles which is the result.

I think that the problem of The Egg could have been solved by turning it into a parody of English manners, possibly provincial manners, with situa- tions modified to suit an Outsider of the Lucky Jim variety played by Alec MacCowan. A French

flavour would be better suggested by playing at enormous pace and importing, if necessary, minor characters with the kind of dead-pan lunacy that one only seems (why?) to see on the French stage. I would not, however, part with Miriam Karlin as Emile's dumb mistress for any consideration In the world. During her brief appearances the even- ing leapt into devastating life.

DAVID WATT