Word: anouilh
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Saxon Rebel. Poets from Tennyson to T. S. Eliot have struggled with the problem of Becket. In Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot maintained that "Christian martyrdom is no accident" but an act prearranged either by God or the doomed man. France's Jean Anouilh built his play Becket more on the love-hate relationship of the king and archbishop, but also claimed that Becket was a Saxon rebel against England's Norman overlords. To Poet Christopher Fry, in Curtmantle, King Henry was the tragic hero and focus of the play; Becket vanishes from sight after his murder...
...Anouilh, like Shaw, tends to become a prisoner of his own brilliance; audiences leave some of his conversation-plays so impressed by the wit that they are oblivious to the thought content...
...deals with a count who dresses his house guests up in Louis XV costumes and has them put on a play to amuse his guests at charity ball. The characters are given roles that resemble their real-life roles and they act out their bitterness on the stage. And Anouilh's plot turns out to be very similar to that of the play-within-a-play, Marivaux's Double Inconstancy...
...even think of improving lean Anouilh's Becket, whose Broadway production starred Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn, strikes theatrical circles as outrageous hubris, but it failed to faze Anhalt. "The main problem was to stop it from being a play," he explains, "to stop it from being theatrical, and to make it real. Becket on the stage was a series of stylized tapestries. Anouilh had to refer to things that happened offstage, the excommunication scene, or the scene in which Becket is accused by the King's prosecutor, for instance. I had to make the two men into...
Through the Superscope. In preparation, Anhalt read the play repeatedly and attended several performances before he began blocking out the screenplay. With Anouilh's dialogue firmly in mind, he proceeded to invent the missing scenes. Only when he had rewritten it as a screenplay, bearing in mind the mobility and intimacy of the camera, did he reread the play "to see if I had eliminated anything that I should have kept." He found his most important change had been to take much that seemed "too cerebral and put it back in emotional terms." The result was a stunning, emotional...