Word: giraudoux
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...Charles Playhouse has produced an adaptation of The Madwoman of Chaillot by Jean Giraudoux that is remarkable for both its lightness and its sensitivity. It never bogs down in convoluted intellectual satire, as can easily happen when a less skillful company tackles Giraudoux; yet it does sacrifice ideas for either liveliness or wistfulness. Idea, or more specifically, idealism, is not buried. Its threads are carefully woven together in the first act and triumphantly knotted in the second. Evil falls victim to its own greed, love blooms again, and innocence reawakens...
...exuberance that the actors transmit to us makes the fairy tale's happy ending even more delightful. But Giraudoux's philosophical conclusion is not sanguine. His satire is too sharp, his villains too sinister, to lull us into sleepy security. Though evil may have been destroyed in the fantasy, Giraudox reminds us that, in real life, it is still attacking us, and that only the mad remain innocent. Love, like innocence, is elusive. Aurelie moans for her long-lost lover, Adolphe Bertaut, yet when he and all of the world's Adolphe Bertaut's offer themselves to her, she cries...
...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...
...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...