Word: anouilh
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Poor Bitos, by Jean Anouilh. A game played for real is either war or murder. In France, the game of politics is a visceral sport. Poor Bitos hinges on this sport, but American playgoers may respond more to its fascinating intellectuality than to its somewhat alien passions...
...Anouilh puts his characters into wigs, and they traverse the centuries back to the French Terror of 1793. The play begins ten years after the end of World War II. Maxime (Charles D. Gray), a rich aristocratic rightist, decides to hold a wig party in a Gothic catacomb of a cellar. All his guests are to come as leading figures of the Revolution. Maxime himself plays Saint-Just. Other friends play Danton, Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI ("virtually a nonspeaking role") and the Comte de Mirabeau. The butt of the party is to be Bitos (Donald Pleasence), the local deputy prosecutor...
...enough to warn him to leave the house before the final indignity. Without a word of gratitude, Bitos turns on his heel with graceless implacability ("If I can ever get my own back on you all one day, you are the one I shall begin with"). This is Anouilh at his most psychologically astute, recognizing that a man may endure all sorts of barbs aimed at his social class or ideological allegiance, but that he cannot forgive a woman who rejects him for himself alone...
While the play makes Maxime and his friends as mean-spirited as Bitos, it sides somewhat with the aristocrats. Those born to power may be corrupt, Anouilh seems to argue, but they know how to rule and they can dispassionately temper justice with mercy. But the arrivistes of power, the burning incorruptible zealots like Bitos-Robespierre, pursue justice so obsessively that they end up being savagely unjust. Anouilh masterfully unfolds the psychology of the revolutionary mentality, with its abstract love of "humanity" but contempt for individual men, together with the secret snobbery of the proletarian leader who greatly prizes...
...able but seemingly perplexed cast can scarcely redeem itself, let alone the play. Ben Gazzara sets the acting tone of the evening with a performance of marmoreal monotony. Everyone labors strenuously over the point that Anouilh talkily belabors: to be robbed of the worst, or the best, past is not a theft but a gift. Anouilh further argues, without his later agile irony and cogent wit, that a man can indeed escape his past, which suggests that the young playwright still harbored at least one fond and vastly foolish illusion...