Paris Theatre
The Great Bed of Turenne
By BAMBER GASCOIGNE The facts don't fit this picture. Paris may have produced as many playwrights as London in the past decade, but they are hardly a young new wave—the average age of Beckett, lonesco and Genet is fifty-three, and Anouilh, who wrote his first success in 1931, is still one of France's youngest playwrights, being younger than Sartre, Adamov, Artaud, Beckett and Genet. Further- more. not one of these new playwrights has presented a new play this season, whereas Anouilh, who passed his peak in 1946, has pro- duced two. Comfortable nostalgia would seem to be the prevailing theatrical tone. Not only is there at the moment a revival of Anouilh's Ring Round the Moon, but there is also yet another revival of lonesco's The Bald Prima Donna, the third since 1951.
We complain of our sluggish audiences, but all the little 'art' theatres that I visited last week were only one-third full, with one exception— and that one was showing Anouilh. We com- plain of the discomfort and commercialism of our West End theatres, but by Paris standards every one of them is as delightful and friendly as the Mermaid. In Paris the play starts twenty minutes late and for the next half-hour people still come chattering in. At every turn someone needs a tip, and the programme, which costs three shillings, contains nothing but glossy photo- graphs of the cast and, usually, some stagger- ingly pretentious panegyric on the author or theatre manager. In one cast of four I found that three of the actors named in the programme were no longer in the production. I had there- fore bought three large photographs of three complete strangers. No one but me seemed to find this odd.
The succes de scandale of the moment is La Fourmi dans le Corps, by Jacques Audiberti. This has caused a stir not purely by its content, but by the fact that it is presented by the Comedie Francaise, which has almost as poor a reputation in Paris as the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Admittedly the play shows a young nun seducing a French officer on the bed of the great general Turenne, but hardly in such a manner as to constitute a slashing criticism of French history, the army or the morals of the Roman Catholic Church. The seduction merely takes its place in an elaborate allegory about intellect and sex, about Puritanism and maturity. M. Audiberti is a poet and his main interest lies in his flow of exotic language. His play is, in effect, a poor imitation of Giraudoux, exag- gerating his verbal excesses but lacking the theatricality of his imagination. The Comddie Francaise presents the play in magnificent sets and costumes, but the company, cradled for too long in alexandrines, insist on speaking the prose as though it were deformed verse.
Another current allegory, already much writ- ten about, is Francois Billetdoux's Va Donc Chez Tiirpe—the subject this time being the stereo- typed values of the community versus the pri- vate souls of individuals. A group of people gather in Mlle Throe's inn, all seeking the mean- ing and value of life. As they fail to find it, one by one, they commit suicide. A police in- spector, played with india-rubber energy by M. Billetdoux himself, comes to investigate, but finds that his brisk, mechanical prying merely brings about an additional suicide. The play's weak- ness is that M. Billetdoux's 'individuals' are all drab, half-dead and hopeless. If these dreary narcissists were all that individualism could achieve, the arguments against conformity would have no force at all.
In his latest play, La Faire d'Empoigne, Anouilh is wittier than he has been for some time. He returns to his oldest theme—idealism versus expediency—but whereas in his war-time plays the issue was ambiguous, the idealist is now an unmistakable booby, a tin soldier in a chocolate-box uniform. The mood is almost Shavian. Described as `a sto,ry of the time when France had many changes of government,' the play shows the alternating reigns of Napoleon and Louis XVIII and draws some amusing parallels with the present time. The reaction of the audience was fascinating. Louis XVIII and his courtiers escape to London during Napoleon's first reign. When, like de Gaulle, the King re- turns in triumph, he announces that his depar- ture was a luxury and that it was the ordinary people, carrying on the everyday life of the country, who constituted the real .France at that time. At this point the middle-aged burghers in the audience feverishly applauded themselves for their glorious past.
At one end of the scale of French acting is the formal declamation which is so perfectly suited to Racine, but not to quite so many other authors as the French believe. At the other end comes a great deal of shouting and banging about, which passes as naturalism--perhaps with some justification, when one considers the tenor of normal French conversation. Naives Hiron- delles, strongly recommended by lonesco on the billboards, is in the banging-about school. Two young men in a shack, plus a neighbour and a young girl, drift for three hours aimlessly and noisily between frivolity and deep pretentious- ness. The programme informs us that the author's composition is musical and that his themes include age, the difficulty of doing several things at once, things which arrive and things which get broken, the importance of regular meals, the intoxication of phrase-making (sample: sandwich a saucisson sec, je sais cc que c'est) and the glory of useless tears.
Of the present musical shows,, Raymond Devos' revue Les Pupitres makes an original and amusing evening. His sketches flow into each other, with events in one having repercussions in others, so that the whole evening adds up to a continuous kaleidoscopic tour of Devos' 'pri- vate world. His style is a combination of knock- about and fantasy, Robert Dhery and Peter Cook, and he himself performs with infectious enjoyment. A more recent arrival, Les Femmes Femmes, is a very small-scale musical about the early days of cinema which achieves a certain gaiety of the Boy Friend type.
The show at the Theatre de Dix Heures is probably the best, certainly the most popular, of the chansonnier cabarets. Henri Tisot is the star of this show, having become famous through his parody of a de Gaulle speech, L'Autocircu- lation, from which they say le general has by now taken a few, tips. His new sequel, to judge by its title, La Depigeonisation, sounds pleasantly apt. Tisot was off while I was there, though he will be back by now, but even without him the show maintained a high standard of topical wit (sample: we used to have thirty ministers, but since the new franc we have .03). I was interested to find, though, that far from being politically committed, these satirists are just as anarchistic as the Beyond the Fringe team. De Gaulle is in power, so they mock de Gaulle; he has almost achieved Algerian independence, so they mock Algerian independence (It'll be France algeri- enne next'). This either makes them OAS sup- porters or court jesters—they are the latter. One does admittedly feel that their cabaret is more daring than Beyond the Friiw—not because the barbs are sharper, but because one is not certain how much they are risking under the present regime. In complaining that our satirists are ineffectual, is one perhaps just criticising our Government for not being repressive?
The one familiar merit of French theatre which I disingenuously left out of my list is that they have three heavily subsidised national theatres. The TNP (Jean Vilar) is at the moment doing L' Avare, in a production which apparently repre- sents a whole new approach to Moliere, and the Theatre de France (Jean-Louis Barrault) is doing Giraudoux's excellent play Judith, unperformed in Paris since an initial flop thirty years ago. Since I was looking for new plays, and since Judith is being done in London very soon in Christopher Fry's translation, I saw neither of these productions. But even if, as I believe, we can more than hold our own in playwrights, actors, directors, audiences, theatre conditions and even satirists, we still have everything to learn from France, and indeed from all Europe, about the community's financial responsibilities to the arts.
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