Word: anouilh
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...Jean Anouilh burst forth in the 1930's as the bright young man of French theatre. His Thieves' Carnival (Le bal des voleurs), written in 1932 when he was only 22 years old, is currently the second offering of the Boston Summer Theatre Festival, and a welcome...
Until last week Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark was chiefly a Broadway bird. In Hallmark Hall of Fame's skillful TV version, wispy Actress Julie Harris embraced the difficult role of St. Joan like the old friend it has been and, in striking closeup, breathed her special humor and humanity into a rare historic abstraction. As the play opens, Joan is seated on a crude stool, her head bowed, before her judges. In a series of subtly conceived flashbacks, she plays out her great scenes: from the meeting with...
...Waltz of the Toreadors (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Lucienne Hill) is an often hilarious French sex farce. As just that, it is conceivably the best envelope Anouilh has yet found for conveying his philosophic approach to life, with its bitter personal tang, its overprotesting cynicism, its disillusionment so dark as to suggest illusions once far too rosy. In Waltz, by reducing to caricature the romantic attitudes that get men betrayed, he more nearly rises to truth than when steadily whiplashing the betrayers. As Ring Round the Moon also showed, he achieves a detachment in a world...
...general chained, for all his infidelities, to the sickbed of a not-really-sick jealous shrew of a wife. He is equally chained to his high-romantic memories of a young girl he waltzed with at a ball 17 years before and who now suddenly appears on the scene. Anouilh's General St. Pe, a Don Quixote when he is not a Don Juan, needs-as he grows older-stronger and stronger rose-colored glasses, and is all the more romantic for the day-to-day realities of a vixen wife and two ugly daughters...
...there is Mildred Natwick, as the wife, gorgeously spewing bedroom billingsgate and hilariously shifting from an invalid's helplessness to an athlete's violence. But out of the mouth of farce-like cold water from the mouth of a fountain gargoyle-flows a stream of cold wisdom. Anouilh uses the coarse, truthful exaggerations of caricature deliberately to offset the genteel evasions of life painted in watercolor. The general's foundling son may just be the latest in a long Gilbertian line; but the Jostling father, the middle-aged satyr with his subaltern dreams, who finds it harder...