Purity Corrupted

The Rehearsal, by Jean Anouilh. The world will ferret out purity and destroy it--this is the theme that obsesses Anouilh. In The Rehearsal, the worldlings commit an "elegant and sophisticated crime," the murder of the true love, as undeniably transfiguring as it is seemingly banal, that exists between a jaded French count and a virginal governess. Around this crime Anouilh has fashioned a subtle, scintillating, and bitter black comedy. The ironic gaiety is inverted mourning, the unseen tears are those that disillusionment sheds over its lost illusions.

The Rehearsal is a play-within-a-play. The time is now, although the count and keeper of an 18th century chateau is rehearsing his costumed entourage in an 18th century comedy by Marivaux. The bulk of his cast is a very aristocratic, very French menage a quatre: the count (Keith Mitchell) and his mistress, the countess (Coral Browne) and her lover. Another actor is the count's longtime friend (Alan Badel), a professional womanizer sardonically named Hero. According to the code of this set, the only liaison dangereuse is with a person outside one's own class.

When the count casts the 20-year-old governess (Jennifer Hilary) as the .young heroine of the Marivaux play, he courts this danger. As he rehearses with her, the count discovers a love he thought himself incapable of, a love that fulfills itself by giving rather than taking. In its romantic purity, this is a love that is outside time and circum stance, beyond good and evil.

The countess retaliates by suggesting that Hero seduce the governess. The seduction scene is the brilliant apex of the play, and as Alan Badel masterfully shades his performance from dueling banter to abashed tenderness, his acting moves beyond skill into the permanently and poignantly memorable. The next morning the governess flees the chateau, and the others seem ready to go on playacting at life as if it were still another comedy by Marivaux. All except Hero. He has seen himself for what he is and the world for what it is, and he taunts the countess' lover into challenging him to a duel that is, in effect, suicide.

French Playwright Anouilh has too often been dismissed as a kind of verbal dandy. Yet his underlying vision of life is dark and inconsolable. Anouilh's characters suffer with a quip on their lips while stretched on a rack that is the distance between the way things are and the way they want them to be. Anouilh is not interested in either ex posing or extolling his characters. He simply wants to catch them, and the audience, in the cruel toils of the human situation, masked, as it always is, with deceptive everyday smiles. Of The Rehearsal, as of all his finest plays, he could say with Nietzsche: "We have art in order that we may not perish from truth."

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