Word: servants
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...Servant. Cullmann approaches the Gospels like a paleontologist reconstructing a human head from the fossil of a jawbone. As U.S. Scholar Maria
Robert Hirsch, who plays Scapin, combines violent exuberance and beautiful control reminiscent of the best of the silent film comedians. Mime, pantomine, and contortion are all arts he has mastered: he is a wheezing old man, then a flopping puppet, then a cowering servant, then a victorious plotter. And the roles are all convincing and hilarious...
None of the secondary parts require such virtuosity, but each of the minor actors has his own excellence. Jacques Charon, as a dim-witted, oafish servant manages to steal a scene even from Hirsch; Michel Aumont, an old miser, and Rene Camoin, an old wheezer, are unsurpassable; Micheline Boudet, believed to be an Egyptian gypsy (but in reality a long lost daughter of the old wheezer) has one scene all to herself, a scene which slowly and carefully raises the level of the audience's laughter from smiles to belly-laughs, one of the greatest scenes in the play...
Hofmann was born in Weissenburg, Bavaria, and his well-meaning father, a stolid civil servant, had hopes that the boy would one day be a famous scientist. Young Hofmann had the aptitude: he pored over engineering books, when scarcely out of school invented an electromagnetic comptometer. But at 18 he abandoned his tinkering to devote himself fulltime to art. He went to Paris, had a brief flirtation with the Fauves-the radical "wild beasts" who were moving away from objective naturalism-and with the cubists. The affair was "rather a platonic one," says he, for he was already preoccupied with...
...first half of the play is devoted to the flight of "the good Grusha," a servant who has picked up the Governor's son, abandoned by his mother during an uprising. She is pursued endlessly over mountains and rivers, all because the child is a valuable object. Despite her suffering, Grusha refuses to desert him, which serves to show (in terms of character) how good she is, and (in terms of politics) what the right of ownership really entails...