Word: giraudoux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ability to express himself with elegance and precision is highly prized at the Quai. Novelist Remain Gary and Playwright Jean Giraudoux were foreign service officers; Poet St. John Perse (actually Alexis Leger) rose to the No. 2 post at the Quai; and Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma while in the diplomatic corps. Richelieu once effortlessly composed a 500-line insert for Corneille's verse drama, Le Cid, to replace a passage of the author's that Richelieu thought in bad taste...
...climactic scene of The Rehearsal, one of the few glittering productions in the dismal new season on Broadway. It is the motif of the play and the motif of Playwright Jean Anouilh, who is perhaps the most produced of all living playwrights. Since the death of Jean Giraudoux almost 20 years ago, Anouilh (ahn-oo-ee) has been the essential voice of the French theater-a voice that speaks so dryly of shattered hope that you can almost hear it break...
...Giraudoux created in Ondine a perfect young girl: fresh, vibrant, beautiful, spontaneous, loving. In her, as Maurice Valency has observed, "everything is possible and nothing ever happens...
Unfortunately, the same could almost be said for the Quincy House production of the play. Giraudoux, with his delicate nuances and extremely subtle text, taxes the most talented and careful actors. This play in particular, demands a great deal of skillful technical work as well as fine acting...
...other hand, William Docken as her lover Hans was overly boyish in a part Giraudoux wrote to embody the tragic predicament of man. He didn't seem to realize why he loved Ondine and only at the very end of the evening, when he dies did he grasp the nature of his problem. Mr. Docken's limited supply of gestures proved to be a formidable handicap...