Word: anouilh
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There are plays and plays. Some should not be adapted or altered for performance on stage, but equally, there are other plays that positively need to be clamped down to a specific interpretation. Anouilh's "Waltz of the Toreadors" is one of the latter kind and suffers when a director is not willing to take liberties with the material, to chop and focus on some particular human experience...
...play is done straight, in full color period dresses and with immaculate props, in short the full Shaw treatment. And this is a grotesque mis-application because, among other reasons, Shaw is supremely logical in his plays with all the events and incidents falling sensibly into place, while Anouilh...
...mechanical level Anouilh feels no need to explain how the letters to Bonfant find their way into Madame Mlle, de Ste. Euverte's hands, on a textual level he feels no qualms about using the term 'soul' to explain contradictory situations. When Anouilh wants to indulge in a dissertation about 'honor' he so indulges, forming such a situation even though nothing of the resulting discussion between the General and his Secretary is coherently related to the characters or the action of the rest of the play. This is not a fault--it is just another style of writing plays...
...American Shakespeare Festival, the powers-that-be have for the fourth time gone outside the Shakespearean canon. The first departure, in 1963, was Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra; and this year we once again have Shaw. In between, the Festival gave us Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Anouilh's Antigone...
Claudio Buchwald plays the Author at Quincy House, a self-pitying sort who is trying to piece together a melodrama of murder, poverty, and lust from a collection of uncooperative protagonists. At the outset Anouilh has the courtesy to apologize, though the Author, to Pirandello. After that, Buchwald is left to intervene periodically as the play drifts out of his control. He does so with reasonable skill, although his expression of unrelieved anguish and his habit of passing off fidgeting as unease begin to wear after a while...