Old Plays in Manhattan

L'lmpromptu de Versailles and Les Fourberies de Scapin (by Moliere) opened the Comedie Franc,aise' three-week visit at the City Center by happily passing up fanfare for fun. With such full-length classics as Moliere's Tartuffe and Racine's Britannicus to follow, a troupe that matches polish with perkiness leaped in with minor Moliere and made it seem, in a dreary season, a major evening even for those with shaky French. The two works, moreover, make a pleasant contrast.

Concerned with rehearsing something rushed into production on Louis XIV's orders, L'Impromptu wags a finger in several directions: a little at the King for his capricious commands, a lot at Moliere's enemy actors in a rival troupe, a lot more at acting itself. In L'lmpromptu, Moliere personally directs the rehearsal, sketches actors' roles, silhouettes their shortcomings, and is now friendly, now irritable, now ironic amid travestied types of people and exaggerated modes of acting. With the Comedie Franc,aise players bringing a sense of style to their very distortions of it and making every baroque French character a bright character part, L'Impromptu is a neatly controlled romp, a briskly ceremonious curtain raiser.

By comparison, Les Fourberies de Scapin (roughly, "Scapin's Knavery") is a farcical hellraiser, with its resourceful scamp of a hero--the traditionally pert and clever servant--engineering a whole repertory of deceptions with a full battery of slapstick. Based on a famous Roman play, Terence's Phormio, Les Fourberies is served up in the famous Italian style of the commedia dell' arte. For their sons' sake, Scapin hoodwinks two miserly fathers--one of whom, as the price of Scapin's saving his life, has offered him a coat "after I've worn it a little longer." Whether mimicking the old boys or mulcting them, whether hiding them in sacks and clouting them or--caught out--gaining their pardon by pretending to breathe his last, Scapin is never stumped. Full-bloodedly, unabashedly crude, Les Fourberies is something to race through in nonstop French, to keep ricocheting with nonstop foolishness.

At the City Center almost every character has his amusing bag of tricks, while Robert Hirsch, as Scapin, is something extra and something different. Looking lithe, gamin, even apache in a very modern way, Hirsch is fun-loving but hardbitten, a kind of acrobatic con man, up to every trick, on to every wile, physically all bounce, mentally all barbed wire. Hirsch's Scapin seems even more resourceful than Moliere's, and on a stage full of antique, chattering magpies and grinning dolls and grimacing puppets, he is a kind of unpredictable mechanical toy with, at moments, shock value as well as spin.

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