Word: anouilh
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...REHEARSAL rehearses a young and innocent governess for the later cruelties of life. Playwright Anouilh orchestrates a seduction scene-the play's best-with brasses of bravado, violins of pity, and flutes of tenderness...
...REHEARSAL. Playwright Jean Anouilh achieves a stylish symbiosis of good and evil in which the pure love of a young girl is subverted by a drawing-room coterie, which in turn finds that it can no longer treat love as a game...
Vanishing Goat. At 53, Anouilh is rich, famous, and a recluse. Even on opening nights, he hides craftily-in the prompter's box, if there is one. The only glimpse people might have of him later is of an overcoated figure loping away over cobblestones. Few would recognize him even if they had studied his picture. He suggests a small-town storekeeper with a long face, an unassertive little mustache and silver-rimmed glasses...
Edwardian Flavor. Warm with his friends, bloodlessly cruel toward strangers, Anouilh can be arrogantly self-assured one moment and glibly self-deprecating the next. When an English director commented that Waltz of the Toreadors was a good play but the Paris production had been a mess, Anouilh shrugged and explained: "Yes, I directed it." He prefers to work with unknown or even bad actors so that he can dictate their every gesture and intonation. In the Paris version of The Rehearsal, he broke this custom by casting Jean-Louis Barrault as the count, but soon he was saying to Barrault...
...Anouilh early looked upon the modern world and found it bad. In his recoil, he stepped back to 1910, the year of his birth. His reading had caused him to believe that the world had held out a promise to him then that it had long since slapped out of his hands. Many of his plays, as a result, are set around 1910, and still more have an Edwardian flavor even if they are contemporary. His plays often express nostalgia for hope and optimism in the spirit of a young girl (as in The Rehearsal), countering it with examples...