Word: giraudoux
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...play was written by Jean Giraudoux, author of "Amphitryon 38," and the recent Broadway success, "The Madwomen of Chaillot." Prior to the Cambridge opening, the group plans to take the "War" on the road, with a Wellesley opening scheduled for November...
...Enchanted (adapted from the French of the late Jean Giraudoux by Maurice Valency; produced by David Lowe & Richard Davidson), whatever its weaknesses as a play, is frequently enchanting. A fantasy, as was Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, it uses a much slighter and more tremulous fable. Instead of grandly and wackily turning Paris upside down, it delicately turns existence inside out. Half the play merely suggests and evokes, like music; even the solider half is mostly talk...
...than it does story. But The Enchanted is saved from any allegorical pallor or patness, from any insistent contrast of illusion with reality (e.g., romantic yearnings for the moon with realistic cultivation of gardens) by its doubling back on itself and by its gay, vigilant irony. Through the inspector, Giraudoux pokes merciless fun at literal-mindedness, practical wisdom, bureaucratic palaver. Yet he knows, and expresses with the sad sparkle of his wit, that man needs feet even more than wings, and must accept reality to survive. But there is yet another turn of the wheel: man need neither flee reality...
Seldom really human but everywhere humane, The Enchanted shimmers with a fine Gallic playfulness. It improvises a quick, ingenious answer for everything, doubtless as a way of saying that there is no certain answer for anything, and that the nearest thing to release from care is a fantasy by Giraudoux. The obvious theater qualities which The Enchanted lacks are richly offset by the rare ones it has. It is rather a shame that the production has just the earthiness needed by the play, the play just the airiness needed by the production. Adapter Valency's version is good...
...Odets and Saroyans--and other dealers in messages and whimsy--could do well to study Giraudoux' method of wedding them. "The Madwoman of Chaillot" has its share of yuks all right, but the best parts are not those which provoke loud laughter but rather a silent 'yes' when the Madwoman--with the perception of the insane and the logic of the child-like--cuts sharply through to the truth of the matter. The healthy heart-beat of humanity can be heard in this play...