Word: giraudoux
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...play changes shape in the eye and era of the beholder. When Tiger at the Gates was written in 1935, the shadow of Hitler fell across the world and darkened the significance of Jean Giraudoux' drama. In its first U.S. production in 1955, the menace of McCarthyism seemed to be echoed in the play. Doubtless the mentors of Manhattan's Lincoln Center now see this tragic confrontation between the Greeks and the Trojans as a cautionary parable of the U.S. commitment in Viet Nam, though the analogy is wrenchingly sophomoric. The sad fact is that Tiger cannot carry...
Couching his pacifist message in Gallic irony, Giraudoux bandies about the question of whether the Trojans should pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to hold onto Helen, the world's most beautiful woman. As with the role of Cleopatra, it is virtually impossible for any actress to live up to that kind of advance billing. Jennifer West fails abysmally by playing Helen as a dumb, dumb blonde, more waitress than temptress; far from launching a thousand ships, it appears doubtful whether she could pilot a coffee cup across a hash house...
...Bosco has talent enough to take half the curse off the part. As he talks sense to his fellow Trojans and debates with the wily Ulysses, Hector seems always on the verge of averting the madness of war. Actually, it is merely a delaying action against ultimate defeat. For Giraudoux is bent on proving that there is a vile instinct in man that wills to kill. The play ends sadly and cynically with war breaking out and Helen kissing a new lover, Troilus...
...their way of sneezing or of wearing down their heels that a condemned people can be recognized," wrote the French playwright Jean Giraudoux. In his report on 18th century France in the shadow of the guillotine, Sanche de Gramont, Parisian journalist and historian (The Secret War, The Age of Magnificence), has done a heel measurement and sneeze count on his country's monarchy in its declining years. His conclusion confirms Giraudoux's epigram: The monarchy literally lost its head when it lost its style...
...ancient Greek legends. The trend started at the turn of the century with Gide, who wrote stage pieces about Philoctetes, Prometheus, and Oedipus. Montherlant turn-to Pasipha*e, and Cocteau dramatized Antigone, Orpheus, and Oedipus. Claudel turned to Proteus, and did a version of Aeschylus' entire Orestes trilogy. Giraudoux turned to Amphitryon, Electra, and the Trojan War, while Sartre refashioned the Oresteia in his Les Mouches. As part of this movement, then, Anouilh wrote not only Antigone, but plays about Eurydice and Medea...