New Play in Manhattan

The Waltz of the Toreadors (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Lucienne Hill) is an often hilarious French sex farce. As just that, it is conceivably the best envelope Anouilh has yet found for conveying his philosophic approach to life, with its bitter personal tang, its overprotesting cynicism, its disillusionment so dark as to suggest illusions once far too rosy. In Waltz, by reducing to caricature the romantic attitudes that get men betrayed, he more nearly rises to truth than when steadily whiplashing the betrayers. As Ring Round the Moon also showed, he achieves a detachment in a world of fantasy denied him in a world of purported fact.

Laid in 1910, The Waltz of the Toreadors tells of a retired French general chained, for all his infidelities, to the sickbed of a not-really-sick jealous shrew of a wife. He is equally chained to his high-romantic memories of a young girl he waltzed with at a ball 17 years before and who now suddenly appears on the scene. Anouilh's General St. Pe, a Don Quixote when he is not a Don Juan, needs--as he grows older--stronger and stronger rose-colored glasses, and is all the more romantic for the day-to-day realities of a vixen wife and two ugly daughters. In the end his foundling secretary--who turns out to be his son--has carried off his dream woman, and the general is left lonely in the dusk. But he soon enough finds a pretty new housemaid to steal out with into the darkness.

The play is often uproarious farce through the blunt savagery of its incidents. There are wild moments involving the Other Woman or all the other women; there are aborted female "suicides" and aborted man-of-honor duels; and there is Mildred Natwick, as the wife, gorgeously spewing bedroom billingsgate and hilariously shifting from an invalid's helplessness to an athlete's violence. But out of the mouth of farce--like cold water from the mouth of a fountain gargoyle--flows a stream of cold wisdom. Anouilh uses the coarse, truthful exaggerations of caricature deliberately to offset the genteel evasions of life painted in watercolor. The general's foundling son may just be the latest in a long Gilbertian line; but the Jostling father, the middle-aged satyr with his subaltern dreams, who finds it harder to grow older because he has never really grown up, is part of a sharper comic vision. The figure of the general suggests that there would be much less war between men and women were there not so often war in one and the same breast between man and boy.

And yet it is through mocking and exposing the general's dreams under a pitiless white light that Anouilh achieves sympathy for the dreamer; in the very degree that he is harsh, Anouilh is also humane. As long as man's heart has its own convenient method of dating things, and a waltz its own hypnotic power of transforming them, a chronicle like Anouilh's must have its wistful and touching side. As long as the French have their special ambivalent insights--remain the wittiest of fools, the most rational of madmen, the most lyrical of cynics, and look most like dandies when wearing their hearts on their sleeves--a chronicle like Anouilh's will have verve and flavor. And whenever, as in Harold Clurman's gaily staged production, a Ralph Richardson, his whole performance laced with style, can capture, as he struts or ogles or sighs, every facet of an aging, lost, sensual, martial, datedly elegant, faintly idiotic general, such a chronicle must catch the unique excitement of the theater.

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