Cynicism Uncongealed

We danced with impatience, we yearned for the moon and there we are, suddenly, left all alone, with life yawning ahead like a great black chasm . . . So we weep for two or three years more, very quietly, and then one day, too sick at heart, we die, with no fuss, leaving as little trace on earth as a bird's flight across the sky.

A character named Hero speaks those lines with drawn cynicism in the climactic scene of The Rehearsal, one of the few glittering productions in the dismal new season on Broadway. It is the motif of the play and the motif of Playwright Jean Anouilh, who is perhaps the most produced of all living playwrights. Since the death of Jean Giraudoux almost 20 years ago, Anouilh (ahn-oo-ee) has been the essential voice of the French theater--a voice that speaks so dryly of shattered hope that you can almost hear it break.

Anouilh, best known in the U.S. for Becket and The Lark, likes to divide his plays into categories, calling some "black," like Antigone, some "rose," like Time Remembered, others "brillant" (sparklingly theatrical mixtures of the light and dark), like The Rehearsal, and still others "grating"--Waltz of the Toreadors. But everything Anouilh does springs from a pervading and indivisible pessimism. He is a cynic uncongealed: the wound remains open. Abandoned ideals and buoyancies can be seen within. And when he turns on the times, his bite is bitter: "Give us a bit more comfort! That's our battle cry now. All the ingenuity of men, which was harnessed for so long to nobility and beauty, is now bent on finding something a bit softer to put under their bottoms. Contraptions to make our drinks cooler, our houses warmer, our beds softer. It's disgusting!"

Vanishing Goat. At 53, Anouilh is rich, famous, and a recluse. Even on opening nights, he hides craftily--in the prompter's box, if there is one. The only glimpse people might have of him later is of an overcoated figure loping away over cobblestones. Few would recognize him even if they had studied his picture. He suggests a small-town storekeeper with a long face, an unassertive little mustache and silver-rimmed glasses.

He maintains four houses in Paris and its environs, but the doorbells don't function and the telephone numbers are changed frequently, even though they are unlisted. His favorite retreat when writing is a small chalet in the Swiss Alps, where he keeps a pair of high-powered binoculars with which he can study visitors before they arrive--vanishing utterly, like a mountain goat, if they are not to his taste.

Edwardian Flavor. Warm with his friends, bloodlessly cruel toward strangers, Anouilh can be arrogantly self-assured one moment and glibly self-deprecating the next. When an English director commented that Waltz of the Toreadors was a good play but the Paris production had been a mess, Anouilh shrugged and explained: "Yes, I directed it." He prefers to work with unknown or even bad actors so that he can dictate their every gesture and intonation. In the Paris version of The Rehearsal, he broke this custom by casting Jean-Louis Barrault as the count, but soon he was saying to Barrault: "I don't know whether it's your fault or mine, but I'm bored." His humility may come from the memory of his own beginning years. The son of a poor Protestant tailor from Bordeaux, Anouilh got a job as secretary to Director Louis Jou-vet at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees. He earnestly began writing plays, but whenever the great Jouvet saw Anouilh, he would say: "Here comes our failure."

Anouilh early looked upon the modern world and found it bad. In his recoil, he stepped back to 1910, the year of his birth. His reading had caused him to believe that the world had held out a promise to him then that it had long since slapped out of his hands. Many of his plays, as a result, are set around 1910, and still more have an Edwardian flavor even if they are contemporary. His plays often express nostalgia for hope and optimism in the spirit of a young girl (as in The Rehearsal), countering it with examples of repulsive families, bizarre marriages, grubbing politics and permeating corruption. Anouilh has carried this further by marrying two of his young heroines. In a more sour vein, he is forever locked in combat with critics. When they turn on him for his savage implosions of the constituted society, he merely picks up his pen and writes reviews of his own plays for Le Figaro, setting them all straight.

Never changing a word, he writes with two pens, one for serious work and the other for less important tasks, as if the gift of language were in the pens themselves. To censure critics, he uses the pen that has less talent. Using the varsity one would be inhumane.

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