Word: anouilh
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...play that actually unfolds in this sensitive and warm atmosphere is meagre. Anouilh's complicated story line contains some sweeping ideological comment, some incisive portrayal of human trauma, and some biting humor, but it is basically disorganized and incoherent...
...turns out that Bitos is not an unlikely man for the part of Robespierre since he once ordered his closest friend killed because this friend had collaborated with the Germans during the war ten years ago. Anouilh rails at this bit of petty bureaucratic brutality be linking this act of Bitos' to the tortuous reasoning by which Robespierre condemned some of his closest associates to the guillotine...
...Count's living theatre works just fine until the inevitable ingenue (Ellen Endicott-Jones) upsets all the artificial relationships. Anouilh never has time to exploit The Rehearsal's central conceit for he soon finds himself struggling to protect his ingenue from the cynics that surround her. Hero, the Count's alcoholic friend, takes over and the play sloshes forward lugubriously. Humbert Allen Astredo delineates his drunkenness with sensitivity, but there's just so much Anouilh packed into his long monologues, that he can't help but become tiresome...
...real problem with Anouilh is that--for all his painful honesty--he's really more naive than his modern audience. Most of The Rehearsal's third act is a long debate between innocence and corruption. Too long. I knew corruption would win, it always does. I think I even wanted it to win. After all we've been through during the past year, it's pretty difficult for me to hold any truck with feigned innocence, especially when it's held on to so stubbornly. Anouilh is best when he's simply being stylishly bitchy. There are probably enough...
...Anouilh comes from a generation that still finds cynicism painful. He doesn't understand how we've all learned to aestheticize our minds. Anouilh might have once seen a February in Cambridge, but I doubt that he could have ever accepted living through...