Kafka in Pans

The bejeweled countesses and duchesses in the lobby recoiled as a barefoot, plaid-shirted pilgrim from the Left Bank stalked past them. Communist Poet Louis Aragon stood near Catholic Poet Paul Claudel, and close by was Protestant Novelist Andre Gide. The opening night that attracted such a variegated audience to the Theatre Marigny promised to be the most exciting of the Paris theater season. And the promise was kept.

Andre Gide had adapted the dialogue for Franz Kafka's dark parable, The Trial, with painstaking exactness ("I effaced myself"). To convey the uncanny mood of Kafka's story (about a man tried for an unnamed crime and eventually executed by the officers of an unnamed court), Actor-Producer Jean-Louis Barrault (Children of Paradise) had staged it with imagination.

Barrault borrowed heavily from movie technique. Sets faded and others appeared with dreamlike ease and speed. Lights drifted, camera-like, from one scene to the next. Between some scenes, stagehands rearranged props in full view of the audience. To heighten the unreality, Barrault frequently used pantomime with a symbolic abstraction that approached ballet.

Afterward, on the sidewalk outside the theater, intellectuals milled around, furiously debating the merits and meaning of the play. Said the literary weekly Carrefour: "Remarkable. . . . Barrault has a sense of greatness, a poetic imagination." Les Nouvelles Litteraires: "A surprising and almost unhoped-for success. . . . The prodigious miming of Barrault . . . is the soul of the entire play." Only the Communist Les Lettres Franc,aises found it "mortally boring."

Almost everyone gave credit for the hit to Barrault--but not quite everyone. Snapped Playwright Gide: "I am astonished at the magnificent tour de force I have accomplished."

U.S. theatergoers will probably get a chance to decide for themselves who is responsible for what. A Broadway production (in English) is scheduled for April.

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