Word: marivaux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rehearsal takes place at a chateau in modern France, whose owner is staging an amateur production of an eighteenth century melodrama, Marivaux's The Double Inconstancy. The Count insists that his fellow players--including his wife, his mistress, his wife's lover--wear their period costumes during the three-day rehearsal period so that they can grow into their roles. The result is something like an interminable cast party hosted by Stanislavsky...
...play to amuse his guests at charity ball. The characters are given roles that resemble their real-life roles and they act out their bitterness on the stage. And Anouilh's plot turns out to be very similar to that of the play-within-a-play, Marivaux's Double Inconstancy...
...Rehearsal is a play-within-a-play. The time is now, although the count and keeper of an 18th century chateau is rehearsing his costumed entourage in an 18th century comedy by Marivaux. The bulk of his cast is a very aristocratic, very French menage a quatre: the count (Keith Mitchell) and his mistress, the countess (Coral Browne) and her lover. Another actor is the count's longtime friend (Alan Badel), a professional womanizer sardonically named Hero. According to the code of this set, the only liaison dangereuse is with a person outside one's own class...
When the count casts the 20-year-old governess (Jennifer Hilary) as the .young heroine of the Marivaux play, he courts this danger. As he rehearses with her, the count discovers a love he thought himself incapable of, a love that fulfills itself by giving rather than taking. In its romantic purity, this is a love that is outside time and circum stance, beyond good and evil...
...Badel masterfully shades his performance from dueling banter to abashed tenderness, his acting moves beyond skill into the permanently and poignantly memorable. The next morning the governess flees the chateau, and the others seem ready to go on playacting at life as if it were still another comedy by Marivaux. All except Hero. He has seen himself for what he is and the world for what it is, and he taunts the countess' lover into challenging him to a duel that is, in effect, suicide...