The Paris Season

In most recent years, trying to find a good play at a Paris theater has been like trying to find a good bowl of soup at a Paris bistro. The great tradition turns out to be little more than a memory tasted through grease and garlic. The current season began like that.

Item: Franc,oise Sagan opened her seventh play, proving that her precocious fame sprang from the trick of being middle-aged at 18; now that she is middle-aged at 35, her characters are trying to recapture teen raptures. That is all there is to A Piano on the Grass.

Item: Jean Anouilh, with his third play to be running on the boulevards this year, is the kind of illusionist who pretends to show the audience just how it's done. In Don't Wake Madame, he turns some show-business cliches upside down with his accustomed skill, but only to shake out the last sticky-sweet drops of sentimentality.

But the season has been jolted into excitement by two savage and moving comedies, brilliantly played and directed. The authors: Moliere and Jarry.

Sick Circus. Alfred Jarry was the kind of humorist for whom laughter was a rictus; he dug for the cheek nerves with an awl. The first word of his first play--Merdre! as Jarry spelled it--discovered obscenity as a lisping child star and launched her on her modern stage career. That was 1896; Jarry was 23. His egg-shaped Pere Ubu of monstrous honesty, the grotesque Dr. Faustroll with his science of 'Pataphysics and his Caesar-Antichrist are the collective grandparents of the theaters of cruelty and the absurd. As Jarry lay dying at 34--of an acute brain inflammation caused by tuberculosis and aggravated by drink--he was obsessed by that image of death's anarchic joke, a skull and crossbones with its toothy eternal grin. To his last words he was defiantly absurdist: he asked for a toothpick.

Now Jean-Louis Barrault has put together Jarry, a montage of his works, his characters and his life into a circus of the sick. The show is outrageously and necessarily adolescent, relentlessly preoccupied with sex, madness and death, funny and sometimes sharply touching. Barrault at 60 is the man in the mood for Jarry. Two years ago, for letting the students of May 1968 sit in at his state-subsidized Left Bank theater, Barrault was dismissed, as Le Monde has since put it, "like a servant"; even the company's costumes were confiscated. Barrault stormed back.

He took over a wrestling arena beneath the hill of Montmartre, there produced his carnival decoupage of Rabelais, which played for a year, toured England and the U.S.

This fall in the same arena, the same company plays Jarry with manic polish and aggressiveness. There are moments of tedium, but more than a few moments of genius. Most interesting is Jarry's exploration--from the comic-erotic novel Supermale--of sexual excess pursued to the point of agony and death. Demonstrating incidentally that the body costumed can be more profoundly arousing in theater than the body naked, Jarry on sex as produced by Barrault is visually delightful, intellectually provocative, closer to Sade's black understanding than to Tynan's slick preaching.

Bear Baited. The new production ot Georges Dandin has been both praised and hated for an approach that "makes a Marxist out of Moliere." The revolution comes in the inner citadel of the French classical tradition, the 17th century jewel box of Richelieu's theater at the Comedie-Franc,aise itself, where Moliere played the lead before Louis XIV in 1668. Georges Dandin is an early farce, today often left to the schoolroom, about a rich peasant who has married above himself, is cuckolded by his wife and humiliated by her pretentious petty-noble parents. In the bones of every 17th century comedy of manners, sophisticated or crude, there aches a bitter social criticism. Director Jean-Paul Roussillon has made farce into a quicklime laughter that burns to those bones. It is the paradox of modern directing to play a villain for his sympathetic qualities (as Stanislavsky counseled his actors); to play tragedy with a light touch; above all to play comedy straight. The maxim has worked trenchant revelation with English Restoration comedy; with Moliere, from whom the Restoration playwrights learned, it rips the commedia dell'arte mask off the bleeding man beneath.

Butt, cuckold, buffoon--Hirsch gives Georges Dandin the engaging dignity of self-knowledge, the man who says his own name with the rueful shake of the head that makes it ring through the play like a bell, the shrewd peasant who knows he has made a bad bargain in a wife, the naif who thinks he can prove it to the parents from whom he bought her.

The clarity of the social conflict makes all the little details spring alive. The stylized stark setting puts the barnyard in front of the house, puts the in-laws and the aristocratic lover into a flat beige and gold of costume, complexion, hair-proud wigs. Against them all, Dandin's shaggy authenticity strikes out like a bear baited by spaniels. When at last Dandin finds the house empty at night and locks out his wife, the creaking stock situation leaps up with delight while Dandin exults.

When she gulls his simple human sympathy, then extorts a groveling apology the wrench of comic truth lies even in the last unconscious gesture with which Dandin the peasant, stumbling away, stubs out the candle in his barn with bare fingers. Hirsch's is a rare and flawless performance, a French tradition made new.

Horace Judson

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