Old Guard and New Wave

By PETER FORSTER

THEY support some fifty theatres in Paris today (population three million) as against our forty in London (nine million). They have nine musicals against our twelve. Their foreign imports amount to eleven, ranging from O'Neill, Betti and Shaw to Bon Week-end, Monsieur Bennett! by Monsieur Arthur Watkyn, where we show eight. They offer three State-aided theatres, the Comedic Francaise (Sophocles, Moliere, de Musset, Giraudoux), the Theatre de France (Anouilh, Claudel, lonesco) and the Theatre National Populaire (Shakespeare, Moliere, Pirandello); we have the Old Vic, with two Shakespeares and a Wilde. They boast three new pieces by a French playwright of genius; this is a category in which we do not compete. They seem to care less for thrillers, and runs are shorter. In a city where life does not grow noticeably cheaper (it now costs threepence to spend a penny) many theatre seats are still remarkably reasonable —Barrault in Anouilh at the Theatre de France, entertainment of a quality not to be surpassed anywhere, can be seen from the gods for sixpence. By and large, comparison is in their favour, but it is by no means disgraceful for us, especially in the matter of our younger playwrights; their junior talent seems more intrigued by the cinema.

But now they also have a Ministry for Cultural Affairs, the brain-child of Andre Malraux, who has become its first Minister, and those here who immediately bray opposition to any suggestion of State association with the arts may learn from its objectives and -achievements. Activities for- merly dealt with by the Ministry of Education or the Treasury have been reorganised, and four main 'departments work under Malraux, dealing with. Arts and Letters, Architecture, Archives, and the Cinema. Anomalously, television and radio still come under the Minister of Information, Roger Frey.

Malraux's aim is the exact opposite of bureau- cratic intervention in :esthetic matters; it is, on the one hand, to make the most of the nation's artistic patrimony, and on the other to help the arts of today to flourish. The first year's achieve- ments have been notable : a new spirit at the Comedic Francaise, a revived Salle Luxembourg given over to the Barrault-Renaud Company, a dazzling new production of Carmen to restore the status of the Opera. (It is typical of Malraux's canny prestige-seeking that costs of this produc- tion will be recouped by filming it for world-wide distribution.) A consistent and overdue pro- gramme has also been begun for the modernisa- tion of museums and art galleries. Steps are even being taken to bring out the long-neglected reserve paintings in the Louvre, though. this is not with- out its difficulties since one of them is over thirty yards long and nobody knows how it was ever got into the building in the first place.

More important still for the future is Malraux's scheme for decentralisation of the arts in France. This was explained to me by M. Gaetan-Picon, his Director-General of Arts and Letters, a former lecturer on the novel, who emphasised the Ministry's determination not to interfere with the taste or policy of individuals and companies; its concern is with the means. The theatre is to be helped by subsidy and reduction of tax; six Centres Dramatiques de Province are shortly to be set up, and in due course Maisons de Culture will be established in towns throughout the land, buildings which will combine the facili- ties of theatre, art gallery, exhibition hall and study centre. France's first budget for cultural affairs was debated in the Chamber the week before last, and despite the country's present financial austerity an appreciable increase on any previous allocation was voted for the arts. Mal- raux's passionate plea for the encouragement of a culture that is Western but not American, his reminder that it is in such matters that our true remaining influence may lie, might well be heeded here; not that one could really expect it to register with a Government whose sole discernible con- cern with cultural affairs has been a decision not to proceed against Lolita.

But then a sense of resurgence is everywhere evident, even in ancillary entertainments like newsreels and advertising films which cleverly plug new railway stations or engineering projects. It is really no wonder that Roger Vadim's film Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 should have aroused official misgivings and been banned for export. This modernisation of Choderlos de Laclos's story of a corrupt society, brilliantly acted by the late and much-to-be-lamented Gerard Philipe, and by various girls most of whom look like Vadim's wife (one is), carries implications of precisely the kind de Gaulle's France would wish to rebut. At the same time, it offers a fascinating sidelight on what nations take amiss. The corruption in Liaisons is wholly moral, with its indulgent picture (not to be redeemed by a pious last line or two) of the cold-hearted seducer and his compliant wife : the treatment is often erotic but even a voyeur's-eye- view from beneath the bedclothes is not calculated to lay us in the aisles, and there is none of the really salacious vulgarity of some of the Bardot or Martine Carol films. Indeed, many in an English audience would not consider the film im- proper—hardly a glimpse of a breast. It is the difference between the corrupt and the dirty. We prosecute the obscene, they the insidious.

But Vadim's succes de scandale stands apart. M. Gaetan-Picon assured me that the 'nouvelle vague' in the cinema is a journalistic invention, no more to be taken seriously as, a movement than our AYMs of the other year. But it is certainly true that some younger film-makers are revolting against big-budget fantasies in favour of modest realism. Attracted by the advertisement, `tin film 100% nouvelle vague,' I went to Louis Felix's Chaleurs d'Ete, and within 'ten minutes had seen an attempted rape, a dispute about whether or not to stay on the land, and a startlingly endowed girl stripping off by the sea in moonlight for her admirer's benefit; after this they clinched, the camera rose skyward, and waves beat to a crescendo—vogues, if you like, but hardly new.

Yet seen in conjunction with Les /Imams (on view here) and others of the movement, one realises that the younger French cinema has moved far from the bitter and ironical post-war cynicism of, say, Manon 49. Now there is more balance, less nervous worry—no doubt the result in part of a more stable economy, so that the vela rather than the flick-knife has become the appurtenance of true love. The preoccupation with sex seems to spring not from the former death- wish longing for a quicksand, but because in a relatively straightforward bourgeois way it offers a security in an uncertain world. For all the moments of violence, the new men conceive sex romantically; it is a part of love. In more practical matters, a principal concern is clearly with the problems of how far their heritage must be accepted or altered; one feels that the young hero in Chaleurs, the city-educated intellectual decid- ing to work the vineyard left to him, is meant to suggest a mild parable for his generation.

The weakness of some of the new films is often technical, as though the new men were using too many of the old devices, and far and away the most exciting film associated with nouvelle vague is Marcel Camus's Orfeu Negro, which opens a quite sensational box of tricks. It retells the Orpheus legend during carnival time in Rio, with Orpheus a singing bus conductor and Eurydice a visiting negress pursued by Death in a carnival mask. The Greek legend sits oddly on the alien culture, and little attempt is made to follow it through with any accuracy. There is a love story (again treated romantically, in a manner light- miles from Anouilh's Point of Departure) but the be-all is the atmosphere of general riot. I have never seen such colours on a •6creen as in this kaleidoscope of swirling crowd; who samba in from their villages at dawn, and perform some vast afro-asian, aphrodisiac Rite of Spring all day throughout the city until at night the white vans of the riot squad charge through the streets like ghostly streamers piercing the conflagration of revellers, which at the impact break up into orange, apricot, black, gold and pink fragments against a jet-black night.

The electrifying vitality of Orfeu is underlined by the tiredness of Le Dejeuner sur L' Herbe, latest film of the great Jean Renoir, the come-back of the Old Guard, a ponderous attempt to mock most things modern by showing a scientist led back to nature by a lusty Provençal wench. This is still the French cinema of the Thirties, and perhaps made then it would have emerged as a riotous pagan Iowan of irreverence. Now, despite beautiful photo- graphy of Provence, it seems slow and laboured; the kindly humanity remains intact but there is a cantankerous overtone, and the artistic inspiration has ebbed. Speeches about cathedrals being prefer- able to factories may win agreement, but the story in which they are set does not make us laugh. Here, sadly, is a great tradition run to seed.

In the theatre, on the other hand, the Old Guard still dominates the scene, and though it may seem odd to class the ever-iconoclastic Anouilh thus, with over twenty plays to his credit and elevation ahead next year to the repertory of the Comddie Frangaise, he must surely be allowed to have arrived. In fact, with three new plays running at present, Anouilh plainly dominates a theatre in which authors are still considered the most impor- tant artistes. It is difficult to define quite wherein lies the peculiar, untranslatable appeal of the modern French theatre—partly that it caters for an audience which cares what characters say as much as what they do, with the resultant atmo- sphere of debate, partly it is the clear-eyed approach of the artistes to what Barrault calls `ce metier magnifique et absurde.' Be this as it may, Anouilh's current three plays provide a cross- section of all that is most exciting in Paris.

They also run his own personal gamut. The Parisian critics—Gautier, Capron, Roly, Hobson —regard Becket as the most substantial of the three. As somebody remarked to me—'cela est serieux, cela pose des questions!' It certainly does—indeed seldom can a triangle have been more Eternal, since the plot turns not upon love of women but, in the magnificent sub-title, 'The Honour of God.' Anouilh has said that he got the idea from a now-outmoded history book by Augustin Thierry; he makes no pretence to close historical accuracy, and in the circumstances only a pedant would worry. He proposes a Henry II and Becket who are master and servant in an age when 'human relations, based On the loyalty of one man to another, were simple'; but when the King seeks to combat the clergy by making Becket Archbishop, Becket must henceforth serve God against the King.

My own feeling is that Anouilh is again dealing from the pack whose best cards made L'Alotiette. (These have been marked by Eliot, as those were by Shaw.) Here, too, he begins at the end, in this case with Henry's scourging after Becket's murder, and the conflict is again between temporal and spiritual. Also he leans too long and often on the old, old line about the Church being incompatible with Christianity, which will do for an ironical joke but not for a serious argument. Yet that said, what a marvellous sense of theatrical argument he has —the curtain, for instance, when Becket faced with forcible conversion murmurs our own half- formulated thought : 'No, it would be too simple!' Daniel Ivernel's boisterous Henry, and Bruno Cremer's Becket (looking exactly like Stephen Murray), convey perfectly the kind of rough, medieval, rugger-friendship intended. There are four English knights so satirically funny as almost to justify breaking off diplomatic relations—yet, and in the transition is the touch of genius. nothing in the play is more moving than when, at the end, two of the knights wonder from afar what is happening out there on Salisbury Plain at the final meeting alone between King and Becket.

L'Hurluberlu is in lighter vein, the latest addition to Anouilh's new category of pieces griticantes, though less likely to set some teeth on edge than La Valse des Toreadors. This is the bitter scabrously witty Anouilh showing a General (tact- fully played by a medium-sized actor with nose of ordinary dimensions) who plots to regain power in France, but cannot in the meantime cope with his own family. These Anouilh comedies have a flavour all their own, and the diversity of charac- terisation is often underestimated, though this has such perennial Anouilh gimmicks as amateur theatricals and children mimicking their elders; it has also, thrdugh a young man's literary preten- sions, a riotous onslaught on the lonesco anti- theatre school. Sir Laurence Olivier is said to be wondering whether Becket is a part for him; I suggest that it is rather towards the General that he might look.

Of the three Anouilh, the newest is most to my taste. La Petite Moliere is a perfect balance of intellectual weight and technical skill, and is staged by Barrault as 'theatre total,' involving use of cinema, mime, ballet, puppets and short scenes, with a sheer technical ingenuity the like of which has not been seen since Barrault's production of Christoph Colomb. The plot turns on Moliere's desertion of his mistress, Madeleine Bdjart, for her younger sister, Armande (played by Anouilh's daughter, Catherine, a very fetching blonde With a pert lop-sided smile). Marrying Armande, Moliere hopes for domesticity—in vain; while the com- pany is playing for the Sun King off-stage, Armande behind-scenes starts to try on props, and we realise that she, too, wishes to act. Moliere's death is also handled with telling finesse. No death-bed, a mere announcement by loud- speaker of his passing, after which the dressers are putting away his costumes in a trunk, and with the slow roll-call 'Harpagon . . Sganarelle . . . Scapin . . . Jourdain . . .' the company gather silently round.

Perhaps none of these three is an absolute masterpiece, but I know of no other living play- wright who can cover such a wide and individual span, or who is so productive with such quality. Nor is the man himself hidden. Anouilh will not give interviews, but they are not necessary; every play he writes is patently a part of autobiography.

Anouilh's true playwright's equipment, with his present-tense frame of mind, shows up the deficiencies of Jean .Genet's clownerie at the new avant-garde Thatre de Lutece, Les Negres. Tubu- lar scaffolding, expressionist-style set, negro com- pany in a complicated masque about why a white woman (whose coffin lies at the footlights) has been killed, before negro judges wearing white masks and sitting above the action. The sort of thing that used to be done at the Mercury Theatre at the end of the war, contrived, thin, pretentious,

for all the occasional striking phrases. Also, though concerned throughout with the colour problem, it is ironical to find a play in a country without colour bar starting from a viewpoint of resentment that would have been out of date in Kipling's time. But then, whether in Paris or London 1 really do not see why two whites should necessarily make a wrong.