Word: giraudoux
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Duel of Angels (translated and adapted by Christopher Fry from the French of Jean Giraudoux) was the last play written before his death in 1944, by the wittily ironic, aromatically pessimistic author of The Madwoman of Chaillot and Tiger at the Gates. It is a suavely chill farewell -a glass of iced champagne held in almost as cold a hand. Called Pour Lucrece in French, it offers-in the Aix-en-Provence of 1868-variations on the old tale of the violated Roman matron who, after bidding her family avenge her, committed suicide. It opens in the best Giraudoux style...
...itself-violated Lucrèce theme sounds louder chords, as the pure lady bids the rake kill himself only for him to be killed in a duel, as the righteous judge rejects the wife he thinks was raped and she takes poison, rejecting life itself, Giraudoux's artificial story remains scrupulously behind glass. But gusts of realistic rain or melodramatic sleet from time to time beat against it. Giraudoux cleverly lets his characters remark how tragedy is jostling farce, or drama is encroaching on comedy. But the play, as it plunges over rapids in which both men and women...
...whole is not so much a sharp intellectual meaning as a plaintively cynical mood. The old generalities repeat themselves: Must sensuality grow so coarse, or purity so prudish, or life itself so punishing? But if limited in vital substance, Duel of Angels has considerable style. Christopher Fry has conveyed Giraudoux's gloved, sheathed, scented prose with great adroitness, and Roger Furse's sets and Dior's gowns enhance the provincially elegant atmosphere. If much of the acting is simply competent and Mary Ure in the difficult role of the pure woman suggests mere marble rather than flesh...
Malraux also decreed: let there be circuses-and staged the most dazzling Bastille Day celebration France had ever seen. In fact, never since Napoleon had government and culture so complemented each other. When Giraudoux's Electre opened, Paris critics were officially reminded that a French head of state has the privilege of seeing all new performances first; so, in "deference to General de Gaulle," the critics should hold up their first-night reviews until he could get to the theater on the second night. The grand opening of the opera fortnight ago, where Maria Callas had once complained...
...whole historical crowd is there --from Priam all the way to the face that launched a thousand ships. But some of them you might not recognize right away. Giraudoux has chosen his Trojan locale with malice afore-thought. He seems to delight in slipping in anachronistic elements, such as references to the "middle class." Entering the spirit of the thing, director John Beck appears to have added a few of his own: one bare-chested sailor sports a tattoo reading "Mother" --but in Greek, of course...