Word: anouilh
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Legend of Lovers is a bewilderment of contrasts: between realistic and romantic love, cynicism and idealism, the claims of life, impermanent and impure, and those of changeless Death, to whom Anouilh grants a rather mawkish victory. The play has its merits. Amid so many varieties of love, it at least excludes Hollywood's. There are vivid counterpointings, piquant juxtapositions. Eldon Elder's set is splendidly striking; and though Dorothy McGuire seems partly mystified and partly miscast as the girl, Richard Burton, as her lover, plays a difficult role persuasively. But the play grows tedious with saucy twists...
Legend of Lovers (adapted by Kitty Black from the French of Jean Anouilh) is provocative, but at a very high price. On a mythological foundation, Playwright Anouilh has reared a modern fantasy thick with symbolic scrollwork, ironic turrets, philosophic staircases, mystical passageways. Instead of reanimating the Orpheus & Eurydice legend with new poignancy, the play ends by crushing it to death...
Ring Around the Moon, Jean Anouilh's comedy, is still at the Martin Beck...
Ring Around the Moon, written by Jean Anouilh and translated by the esteemed Mr. Fry, is still carrying on as is Black Chiffon with Flora Robson and Affairs of State with Celeste Holm. These plays are more noteworthy for their acting than their writing however...
...Anouilh pursues his characters with mockery that is a little wistful, with sympathy that is a little malign, now capriciously making romance look grey, now perversely making reality seem gilded. At the end he casually mates the characters and whisks them out of sight like so many folding chairs. He skims over a world where things cut two ways and cancel one another out. He is very civilized, possibly overcivilized: the sort of man who would add s'il vous plaît to the Ten Commandments...