Word: barrault
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dialogue for Franz Kafka's dark parable, The Trial, with painstaking exactness ("I effaced myself"). To convey the uncanny mood of Kafka's story (about a man tried for an unnamed crime and eventually executed by the officers of an unnamed court), Actor-Producer Jean-Louis Barrault (Children of Paradise) had staged it with imagination...
...Barrault borrowed heavily from movie technique. Sets faded and others appeared with dreamlike ease and speed. Lights drifted, camera-like, from one scene to the next. Between some scenes, stagehands rearranged props in full view of the audience. To heighten the unreality, Barrault frequently used pantomime with a symbolic abstraction that approached ballet...
Afterward, on the sidewalk outside the theater, intellectuals milled around, furiously debating the merits and meaning of the play. Said the literary weekly Carrefour: "Remarkable. . . . Barrault has a sense of greatness, a poetic imagination." Les Nouvelles Littéraires: "A surprising and almost unhoped-for success. . . . The prodigious miming of Barrault . . . is the soul of the entire play." Only the Communist Les Lettres Françaises found it "mortally boring...
Almost everyone gave credit for the hit to Barrault-but not quite everyone. Snapped Playwright Gide: "I am astonished at the magnificent tour de force I have accomplished...
...Enfants affords U.S. moviegoers a good, long look at several of France's outstanding actors: Jean-Louis Barrault (a graceful, desperate-faced pantomimist currently playing on the Paris stage in André Gide's translation of Hamlet), bouncy Pierre Brasseur and Arletty, a sort of healthy, worldly Mona Lisa who exudes a mature type of sex appeal that Hollywood has always ignored...