Word: anouilhan
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...Then it turns out that he already has a wife, whose wealth keeps his real parents and his mistress and her husband in luxurious idleness. Soon these shoddy-chic cadgers, the pure, unworldly young lady and the three hired attendants are caught up with the young man in an Anouilhan dance of masks and mummery, of virginal love and veteran hate, pouncing as they pirouette, conspiring as they bid adieu...
Rendezvous provides another very Anouilhan clash of sentiment and cynicism, another dream of the pure in a world of the tarnished. As playwriting it never fulfills its bright first-act promise; along with what is striking and amusing, there ensues too much babble of talk and muddle of tone. It is here that the matter of production becomes crucial: a play so nonchalant and brittle needs more than the intelligent off-Broadway staging it has been given. It needs more gloss, more speed, more edged insouciance, needs the light shrug, the swift glance, the faint smile, the finished gesture...
...play nicely balances its blunderer from an age of chivalry against the more practical citizenry of an age of compromise. It is an altogether Anouilhan balance, in that it finds much to be said against both sides. But where Anouilh, a worldly observer with both heart and spleen, shows a certain contempt for the riders of bandwagons, he mocks his knight with compassion. And where, in earlier and bitterer mood, Anouilh set his version of Moliere's surly misanthrope against a too complaisant world, his hero in The Fighting Cock comes closer to Cervantes' cracked...
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