Westward Ho

Four years ago a famous Parisian troupe, headed by a famous acting couple--Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault--paid their first visit to Broadway. Offering chefs d'oeuvres varies--Shakespeare, Marivaux, Moliere--as well as novelties and knickknacks, they particularly scored with their lighter, wittier, most Gallic productions, revealed Director-Actor-Pantomimist Barrault as one of the theater's most agile minds and bodies. Last week, again brought over by Impresario Sol Hurok, the Barrault troupe again promised a menu of both classics (Moliere, Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson) and moderns (Salacrou, Giraudoux).

On his present trip to the New World, Barrault began by saluting another man's more famous voyage there. Christophe Colomb, written by the late French poet (and Ambassador to the U.S.) Paul Claudel, celebrates the discoverer of America as no American playwright has ever bothered to do. Not a play but a pageant, a piece of "total theater," Christophe Colomb employs language, music, choruses, crowds, ballet, a movie screen, a narrator. Nor is Colomb just biographical. It is encrusted with philosophic thought, is suffused with Catholic Poet Claudel's intense religious feeling, and indeed concludes with Queen Isabella's triumphal entrance into Heaven.

After the fashion of pageants, Christophe Colomb--particularly for those a little deficient in French--had its oratorical longueurs, its narrative doldrums. In Actor Barrault it had a Columbus more gamin than heroic. But Director Barrault proved an accomplished showman, and here and there--as in two wittily etched court scenes--a brilliant one. And with Darius Milhaud's lovely music--now pertly dancelike, now swelling or exalted--Christophe Colomb proved an uneven but curiously memorable occasion.

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