Bothered & Bedeviled

The Devils is a tale of demonic possession and human spite fashioned by the late English playwright John Whiting from events that took place in the French provincial town of Loudun in the early 17th century. Father Urbain Grandier, a worldly priest, was accused by a hunchbacked prioress, whom he never met, of having possessed her and the nuns of her convent with satanic frenzies of lust. Having incurred the envy of fellow clerics, the malice of middle-class malcontents, and the enmity of Cardinal Richelieu for opposing certain policies of state, Grandier was convicted of diabolism, tortured, and burned at the stake.

What a playwright reads into historical material of this sort depends on the glasses he puts on, but what he extracts from it as vital drama depends on his inner vision. Whiting puts on every pair of interpretive glasses he can find, but no unifying viewpoint animates or directs the play.

The nuns, predictably, are seen through Freudian glasses: "Secluded women--they give themselves to God, but something remains which cries out to be given to man." Existential lenses are trained on Grandier: "Expendable, that's what we are. Nothing proceeding to nothing." Richelieu and his ruthless envoys are seen through the "power corrupts" bifocals. The Catholic Church is looked at through the horn-rims of the egalitarian mystique: "It is vital that the church must be protected from the democratic principle that every man must have his say."

There are also binoculars of voyeurism, forbidden sights for jaded sensibilities, the peek over the convent wall at hysterical women who, if they were not clawing at nuns' habits, would simply be pathetic creatures in a snake pit. And what of Grandier kissing his young mistress and marrying her to himself with the benediction of the Kyrie eleison? This scene is essentially a closeup clinch in a vast anticlerical spectacular directed by Michael Cacoyannis with all the spurious gravity of a Hollywood Bible epic.

The cathedral vault of a set, the candlelit processionals, the Greek-chorus choreographics of the nuns, the lofty airborne stage platforms--all of these testify less to the flexibility of the stage than to a drama hopelessly tethered to externals. It might have been redeemed if the performances showed inwardness of spirit--a shortcoming hard to account for in such professionals as Anne Bancroft and Jason Robards. Neither seems possessed of God, merely bedeviled by life. Bancroft's hysterical frenzies are technically expert, but they are turned off and on, spigot fashion, as if willed rather than suffered.

Robards seems to sleepwalk through the first two acts. In Act III, when he is shaved, humiliated and tortured, he charges his role with power. At that moment he bears the semblance of a tragic hero, but only the semblance. The playgoer feels pity, not for Grandier (for the playwright never makes him real), but for the blood dripping from his cruelly mangled feet. When he was high and mighty, he showed more doubt than pride. When he is fallen, he seems more full of pain than understanding. The tragic purgation of suffering transcended by self-knowledge evades the playwright, and the play.

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