Three Hits in Two Cities

Startling new plays in London and Paris were exciting audiences:

Ross, by British Playwright Terence (Separate Tables) Rattigan, opened last week with Alec Guinness as Lawrence of Arabia. A complex, 16-scene production, the play reaches brilliantly, perhaps too slickly, into its legendary hero's mind, illuminating but never completely resolving the essential enigma: Was Lawrence the spectacular hero who inspired and led the Arabs in their World War I revolt against the Turks, or was he a lying, unstable charlatan?

With the alias John Hume Ross, Lawrence sought anonymity at the height of his fame (1922) by joining the R.A.F. as an ordinary airman (his later and more famous pseudonym was Shaw). Playwright Rattigan's account begins in the barracks, uses a series of flashbacks to go at the hero's question: "Oh, Ross. How did I become you?" As Guinness of Arabia, Sir Alec is at his subtle, suggestive best, and even the physical resemblance is striking. In his radicalism, there is more than a hint of the showoff; in his sophistication, a climber's cunning; in his humility, the prima donna's beady eye. Frightened of latent homosexuality, he shrinks from being touched, can shake hands only with effort. Yet his Lawrence retains the essential nobility of the desert warrior, proudly asserts that "the only God I worship lives up here in this malformed temple and is called the will."

In the play's climax, a captured Lawrence is subjected to torture and homosexual assault by the Turks, and Rattigan plainly suggests that in the attack the will-god broke and fell, as Lawrence realized at last the truth of his own perversion. Not everyone agreed with Playwright Rattigan's picture of Lawrence, but, wrote Critic T. C. W^orsely: "As one view of the enigma, this will impose itself for a long time." Rhinoceros, Avant-Gardist Eugene lonesco's new play, opened with Sir Laurence Olivier triumphing over the din-and-delirium direction of Orson Welles, lonesco's famed earlier one-acters dealt opaquely with such subjects as a girl with three noses and a man and wife who share their apartment with a growing corpse. This time the playwright almost approaches realism: everyone but the hero merely turns into a rhinoceros.

Rhinoceritis, implies lonesco, is the most communicable disease of the 20th century: under the pressures of mass-think, man loses his individuality and is driven to joining the bestial herd. Many characters protest the change, but relentlessly their skins thicken and wrinkle, their voices become grunts, and great ski-jump tusks appear on their faces. "We must resist rhinocerization at any cost," cry the seemingly unafflicted, but already they start, rhino-like, to munch odd bits of paper, ivy leaves, potted plants.

Soon the only human left in sight is Olivier, muffling his usual heroic style to play--in what the London Times described as "a performance of infinite finesse"*-a mild little boozer who does not agree with the new rhinos that "once civilization is swept away, we shall all feel better." When even the woman in his life becomes a snorting rhinoceros, his own defeat seems close at hand. But he finds the courage to resist rhinocerization.

In the most "committed" line of lonesco's career, Olivier shouts past the descending curtain: "I'm not giving up!" Chateau en Suede, Frangoise Sagan's first play, following her increasingly dull novels, is the biggest Paris hit in many seasons. Sagan's Castle in Sweden is 18th century, down to the costumes of the inhabitants, who seem like characters from a summery Watteau canvas driven inside by the chill of autumn--but the time is 1960. Dressing up is this family's mildest eccentricity. Beautiful Eleonore is devoted to her husband Hugo, but this has never prevented her from seducing every male cousin who comes to visit. Also, she has a brother who is as fond of her as she is of those cousins. Then there is Hugo's first wife Ophelie; when, years before, he wanted to leave her for Eleonore, Hugo merely arranged a fake funeral for Ophelie and locked her in the attic.

The plot simmers when the incumbent cousin begins to bore Eleonore. He loves her; he wants to understand her. But she protests: "Do you really think women want to be understood? Women want to be held, you hear me, held. I have nothing to explain. If Hugo learns that I deceive him, he won't try to understand. He'll kill me. He feeds me, he loves me, and he proves it to me evenings." In the play's climax, Eleonore's cousin-lover tries to escape from the snowbound chateau, but in the spring his small bones are found near by. No matter: word arrives that another cousin is coming. It all sounds like an insane parody of bedroom farce, but Playwright Sagan wrote it with skill, wit and a minor wisdom as dry as an eight-year-old fig leaf. Virtually all the critics, including hoary Academician Frangois Mauriac, praised Chateau. Dissenters could point to an occasional over-cleverness and seize on one of Sagan's lines for their text. "Intelligence has become a terrible thing in our time," notes one character, perhaps speaking of the author. "It torments you, it irritates others, it convinces neither them nor you."

*For a theologian's assessment of Olivier's acting style, see RELIGION.

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