Word: anouilh
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...failure of America to produce dramatists of the stature of Brecht, Giradoux, Pirandello, and Anouilh is one which Bentley explains in terms of the role theater plays in American society. "In this country, the theater is for amusement, which puts the author at a great disadvantage. Significant theater is written to be taken seriously." This is a motif to which he returns frequently. "Men like Hemingway and Faulkner write novels, because they know that novels will be taken seriously. But the play in this country that is both serious and popular is a real rarity...
Becket (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Lucienne Hill) seems to fascinate writers as a stage figure: Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, now Anouilh. He also rather tends to defeat them: Anouilh's long play has the weaknesses without the high compensatory moments of Murder in the Cathedral. In its 22 scenes, Becket offers all manner of effective pageantry and colloquy and confrontation, even of wenching and horseplay; it runs up and down a whole verbal keyboard, playful trills and prayerful chords and swelling harmonies...
...That Anouilh made free with history-anticipated the use of forks in England, changed earldoms to dukedoms, implicated Henry far more in Becket's murder than he really was, gave Becket, what no one else has done for generations, a Saxon lineage-would matter little had all this given Anouilh's imagination greater force and scope. But he has played up trivialities while scamping essentials: Becket's great career as Chancellor is passed over; his clashes with Henry, on becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, go unused. Anouilh, again, oversimplifies character-amusingly enough when treating of minor figures...
...historian has dubbed "a great actor superbly living the parts he was called upon to play" seems far less than that, even with a great actor, Laurence Olivier, on hand to play him. Olivier is as deft as Anthony Quinn's Henry is vigorous, but they serve only Anouilh, they do not light up the past...
...trouble is, perhaps, that Becket did not fascinate Anouilh; he merely tempted and challenged him. With that great facility that is his most self-damaging gift, Anouilh has contrived blunt or ironic or booming effects, pulled off scenes involving bedrooms and bishops and cynical Kings of France, and some fine reflective moments too, as when Becket resists the snare of a false humility. But with equal ease Anouilh goes in for every approach, from the slangiest to the most sculptured. He has thus set Peter Glenville problems of staging that have been only partly solved: with the most inward...