Theatre
Mirage of inconvenience
Kenneth Hurren
For most of his career as a dramatist, Jean Anouilh has been sardonically preoccupied with the ephemerality of love and the unholy permanence of lust, and The Waltz of the Toreadors — written in 1952, and now revived at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket — is probably the wittiest and most civilised entertainment he ever fashioned on this melancholy theme.
His protagonist here, General St Pe, has a romantic ideal wrapped in his heart with the memory of a girl he fell in love with, and she with him, as they danced at a garrison ball seventeen years before. That was in 1894, the general was then only a major, but already married and, in line with the moral scruples he accommodated at the time, his love for the girl, Ghislaine, was never consummated. He is long out of love with his wife (being in love with her, he remarks at one point, "seems as remote to me now as my boyhood craze for collecting stamps"), but he has never been able to administer the hurt of leaving her in the neurotic illness she has developed, and he has come to consoling hiniself emptily in casual infidelities with housemaids and harlots.
All his life, St Pe has been crossed up by love and sex to an unusually spectacular degree, and the reappearance of Ghislaine — still proclaiming her virginal love for him — prompts the ultimate, crushing revelation that his sacrifice has been useless anyway, for his wife confesses infidelities that stretch back almcist as far as his own. He is naturally indignant at the lifetime of futile hypocricy to which he has submitted, but nevertheless there is, now, the tantalising hope of belated happiness. This is no more than a mirage, of course, for the ecstasies of youth are not available to the old and jaded, and the general is forced to come to terms with the fact that life has dealt him a pretty low hand. His trouble mostly, he concludes, has been his inability to escape not from his wife but from himself.
The final blow to his illusions is that it is his young male secretary, wooing ardently with a line he has picked up from his employer, who recaptures the past for Ghislaine. There is nothing left to the general but to potter off, resignedly, to the rose-garden with his arm around the new housemaid. The two couples have a pathetic absurdity that is momentarily touching, but the dominant mood of the play is of high and mocking farce.
It has the advantage of three fine performances in the leading parts: Trevor Howard handles the ancient general's disillusionment with a rich, regretful himour (some of the plot would make
more sense if the old buffer were played about ten years younger, but the theme would make less impact, and I take this to be a calculated risk on the author's part); Coral Browne draws some fiendish comedy from the mortifyingly possessive wife; and Zena Walker gives Ghislaine a rare, romantic ridiculousness. The set by Carl Toms adds to the pleasures of Peter Dews's deft production.
I have nothing agreeable to say about Something's Burning apparently some feeble species of satirical farce, at the Mermaid, and the kindest gesture I can make to those involved in it is to respect their privacy.
Previous page
