Humpbacks in Love and Other Plays

Discovering and rediscovering Jean Anouilh, I’m suddenly returned to the stage of an old theatre. The play is The Cavern (La Grotte) and the theatre is St Martin’s in South Yarra. Anouilh described the set, designer Paul Kathner made it, and I swept it. At the time I had a small offstage job at the theatre. On stage were two levels of an unrealistic house linked by a staircase. The setting was an attractive suggestion, in wood and canvas, of the upstairs and downstairs of a wealthy Paris residence, about 1910. It’s not in the stage directions but at one performance a young girl, the count’s daughter, tripped and fell from the high platform where the aristocratic family preened. She bounced, and got up as though nothing had happened. The child was the niece of one of the actors. Her stage father was a male model in the knitting-pattern books Mum bought and seldom used.

The reputation of Anouilh, once one of the best-known names in twentieth-century French playwriting, has dimmed. In April his name briefly flickered, like a signature written in antique neon, when a performance of Darius Milhaud’s incidental music for his play Traveller Without Luggage was given at the Sydney Opera House. Concert publicity notes called it a “classic” play, though it has not been staged in Australia since the early 1960s: some readers may recall the Broken Hill Repertory Society production (in the Police Boys’ Club Theatrette) in 1961.

St Martin’s was a small professional theatre presenting well-crafted productions of good writing—the 1960s cultural revolution turned that into wrongheaded graffiti for dreary, politically compromised and economically unsustainable theatre. St Martin’s had grown from the earlier amateur Little Theatre group and had opened its own specially built theatre in 1956. It was a subscriber-based company offering thirteen plays a year in three-week seasons. It was an institution to be scorned or ignored by the “New Wave” radicals making plays to be performed in disused stables and bakeries or taking over the universities and public-owned media.

The traditional text-based theatre which St Martin’s exemplified is a lost treasure. Government subsidies destroyed commercial theatre (which is a poor term for classifying St Martin’s) and produced an odd two-winged creation with large subsidised theatres on one side and smaller, fashionable, experimental theatres on the other. Only big musical theatre productions exist in the space between, while outside the arena amateur theatre completely ignores the new writing which has cost taxpayers so much and instead draws on old favourites that bring in audiences. Anouilh, who placed himself in France’s boulevard theatre, was disappearing from our view at about the same time St Martin’s went down in 1973.

Arts funding is fairly simple to understand. The carefully constructed methodology behind it has been worked out over time and has made Australian arts the envy of the world. Funding major arts organisations is a matter of real estate. Those with harbour views, river outlooks and hectares of native title do well: other companies do not. Backroom ladies in black work out the remaining fiddly bits.

What happened to St Martin’s well represents what has happened to Australian theatre. After its closure the premises were bought by the state government, and from the late 1970s and early 1980s they have been the home for St Martins Youth Arts Centre. The change represents far more than a mislaid apostrophe. Presently, the early vitality of the youth theatre seems exhausted. One of the Centre’s latest productions is “a promenade performance work” called 16 Girls. It was a feature of the Castlemaine State Festival in March and is based on an event in America when girls in a local high school deliberately became pregnant:

16 Girls presents a striking image of an ensemble of heavily pregnant teenage girls as they engage in ordinary, everyday activities in a collegiate manner.

16 Girls is a beautiful sculptural work that turns ordinary places into activated performance spaces; the image of a large group of pregnant teenage girls raises many questions and challenges for all those who encounter them.

They got that right. 16 Girls raises questions about using young girls in this way, and the role of the responsible adults involved. The St Martins Youth Arts Centre receives financial support from all levels of government. Why?

If the old St Martin’s had been able to survive the financial stresses it might have offered a home to Australian playwrights who, like Anouilh, would have benefited from working in a traditional theatre. In the 1960s new plays by writers like Russell Braddon, Hal Porter, Thomas Keneally and Morris West were slotted in between Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Lillian Hellman, Jean-Paul Sartre and Harold Pinter. The writing which has come from the new theatres could have been balanced with writing from these older theatres. Instead we went in just one direction which became conformist and controlling and, locked in place by government subsidies, has taken us into a cultural cul-de-sac. Sixties radicalism was built of intolerance. St Martin’s educated and cultivated their audiences.

Earlier this year Red Stitch in Melbourne offered two new plays by British and American writers. The selling pitch suggests a very limited audience they would appeal to and, simply from the outlines given, both plays probably accurately represent the state of contemporary theatre writing: introverted, feminised and submissive.

Wet House by Paddy Campbell:

A Wet House is a hostel for homeless alcoholics where the residents are permitted to drink. Andy, an idealistic young graduate, has begun working as a carer and is full of idealism and increasing confusion. He is plunged into a world where rules about what is right and what is normal have become blurred. And that’s just among the other staff!

Grounded by George Brant:

She’s an F16 fighter pilot; a rock star of the great big blue above. She loves the sky. And suddenly she is pregnant. Now: repurposed as a drone pilot, hunting the enemy by day, living in Las Vegas by night.

Anouilh’s acceptance outside France was not easy. New York critic Walter Kerr recounted the playwright’s history of American flops in the 1950s until

a careless off-Broadway group that had not yet heard of Anouilh’s disgrace ventured to mount his Thieves’ Carnival. The mood was light, the manner mocking, the conceit engaging, and the upshot startling: the newspapers, quite forgetting themselves, liked it.

Anouilh’s acceptance outside France is still not easy, as demonstrated by Charles Spencer’s 2002 review of Wild Orchids (originally Time Remembered) which featured Patricia Routledge: “It is axiomatic among many theatre-goers that Anouilh is an alternative spelling of the French word for boredom.” After complaining of set, direction and new translation Spencer finally succumbed to the play’s “boulevard charms” and “La Routledge”: “With her on board, it’s great fun.”

When Anouilh selected his texts for publication he invented classifications: black plays, pink plays, brilliant plays, grating plays, costume plays. Though he wrote about forty dramas, only a few remain visible in recent productions—Antigone, Becket and Ring Round the Moon. Other works performed in English like The Lark (on Joan of Arc), Poor Bitos and The Cavern have disappeared. Returning to the plays is a pleasure.

The Cavern, with a cast of fifteen, is theatre within a theatre and is a delicate mixture of murder, rape, abortion, class conflict and love. It is introduced to the audience by the author, who has been unable to write it. His characters stand about not knowing what to do or what play they are in, and the author can’t help them. On the high level are the aristocracy. Below is the kitchen of Marie-Jeanne, their cook. When young and beautiful she had been loved by her employer, the count. Their child is now a seminarian. She has been stabbed to death, and the inspector investigates, or would if the author could get on with his play. The seminarian, who has not taken his final vows, falls in love with the maid, who may already have gone to work in a brothel in Oran, Algeria. The author can’t quite get this worked out. It is odd to find mention of a place where I would later live sitting in a play I knew years before. The maid, if she has not already left the play, is pregnant by another man who raped her, and Marie-Jeanne pushes her to accept an abortion. The author’s characters make their own suggestions on where the play should go and complain of his writing. Scenes are changed and replayed. The dead come to life, actors are banished from the stage. There is a spontaneity in the writing of Anouilh (and also the underestimated Sacha Guitry) which is hard to capture in translation, and difficult for actors. Audiences saw The Cavern as theatre in the making; I saw it from prompt corner.

Ardèle was written in 1948 and only performed once in Australia, in 1952. The stage represents the great hall of a French chateau. Two stairways lead up to a gallery at the back of the stage from which many doors open, though one remains locked for much of the performance. Behind it is Aunt Ardèle, a forty-something humpback. We never see her onstage, or hear her. She has fallen in love with her young nephew’s tutor, also a humpback. Her brother the general is outraged at this shame-making event and has locked her into her room and called a family conference, which is the excuse for assembling the cast. From offstage is heard the cry of peacocks. Their sound mimics that of the general’s bedridden wife calling him: “Léon! Léon!” Her debilitating illness is love and jealousy, of her husband: both characters reappear in Waltz of the Toreadors. Their absent eldest son, a sailor overseas, has married a young woman who loathes him and loves his brother, who returns her love, hopelessly. The general’s sister arrives with her husband, another count, and her lover. The count becomes quite sympathetic and explains to his hostile and uncomprehending family that “Aunt Ardèle has a soul in her hump.” The situation is hopeless. The humpback lover, who has no dialogue, steals onstage and into Ardèle’s unlocked room where they suicide. This one-act comedy was turned into a three-act play in English, and the New York production was short-lived: “Cecil Beaton designed the elegant chateau setting and period costumes, neither of which were needed after two performances.”

Ring Around the Moon was adapted by Christopher Fry from L’Invitation au Château. Director Peter Brook had seen part of the original production in Paris:

The performance on the whole was uninspired, yet the fragment I saw was tantalizing, there seemed an enchanting mood hidden away behind it, and I was in a fever for a copy of the script.

Brook recognised the traditional nature of the play and set it running as commedia dell’arte. Anouilh, he wrote, “is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing”. His actors included Paul Scofield (playing twin brothers who entered and exited almost simultaneously), Margaret Rutherford, Claire Bloom and Richard Wattis, and they were given a richly decorative setting to play in. Even twenty-two-year-old Kenneth Tynan was impressed with the design: “Oliver Messel has done nothing for twenty years as good as the flimsy conservatory in which Anouilh’s lovers flirt and part.” The play with its mood of “love and foolishness” was a musical Stephen Sondheim wanted to write. After his second attempt to buy the rights was rejected he instead picked up Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, and turned it into A Little Night Music.

When Anouilh died in 1987, most theatregoers with memories would have thought he had taken a final curtain years before. Appreciation of his work has dimmed. When his plays were immortalised by publication in Pléiade editions in France in 2007 (thirty-four plays in two volumes) the editor was upfront about Anouilh’s eclipse: “In this edition, the text is offered to readers like a ‘play in an armchair’ and to men of the theatre as an appeal to renewed productions.” English readers and directors would be helped by modern translations.

When one of his rebellious characters in The Cavern makes a joke the stage author complains that such jokes have given him a bad reputation in Paris: “elsewhere, it is less important because they are unable to translate them, because of that I have a much better reputation than in France”. Cuts in the old English-language translations, perhaps necessary for practical production purposes, need restoring for armchair readers. Some changes from the original text now seem slightly pointless. In the English Time Remembered (Léocadia) the Prince in his make-believe café orders “Pommery, ’47”. In French he orders “Pommery brut 1923”. His companion, poor thirsty Amanda, asks for “a gin and lime with lots of water”. In French she orders an anisette with water, and the Prince specifies Marie-Brizard (Anouilh had earlier worked for an advertising agency). There has also been some rearranging of acts which need restoring to give foreign readers a better appreciation of Anouilh’s theatre. And it’s surely time to have another look at Christopher Fry’s adaptations of The Lark and Ring Around the Moon.

Anouilh’s private life was kept as private as he could make it, his plays can’t be neatly classified, and his politics seem too independent to satisfy modern theatre-makers. There is a suspicion by the Left that writers who keep their politics to themselves are hiding their attraction to the Right. Anouilh had had certain problems with Antigone, which was approved by the German censors and opened in occupied Paris in 1944. Post-war there were unfounded criticisms that the play was supportive of Vichy.

In 1945 he was one of the few French intellectuals to protest against the death sentence imposed on the homosexual collaborationist Robert Brasillach. With much personal courage he organised a petition calling on de Gaulle to show clemency. Only fifty-one signatures were obtained—Camus, Colette and Cocteau signed, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir refused. It was one of the moments that marked Anouilh’s life:

The young man Anouilh, whom I had remained until 1945, left one morning, insecure (understandable in those deceptive times) but on his left foot, to go get signatures from his colleagues for Brasillach. He went door to door for eight days and returned home old—as in a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

De Gaulle had Brasillach shot. Anouilh fired back in 1956 with Poor Bitos.

The opening night of Poor Bitos in October 1956 turned into the rowdiest audience demonstration against a play in a Paris theatre since Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830; Hugo had more supporters in the audience. The Left critics were unhappy that Anouilh brought together the Terror of the Revolution and the post-Liberation epuration (purification), and laughed: “Summary executions are like boules, it’s a French game.” De Gaulle and Brasillach came to mind when a character remarked that in France a general could always be found to sign a decree, or refuse mercy.

That night Poor Bitos worked its magic. A critic for a far Left magazine stood up threatening to go backstage and beat up Anouilh (he didn’t). After the play the critic left for supper at Brasserie Lipp and had hardly had time to wipe the foam from his lips, so the story goes, before another car cut in front of him and took his parking spot. Preparing again for battle he opened the car door, started to get out, and dropped dead. Surviving Left critics were hardly better intentioned. A bad and boring play, they said, and so convincing were they that Paris decided to come and see for herself, and the play ran for 308 performances. Night after night audiences laughed at a reading of the terror laws of Prairial, 1794—which may say something about the seriousness of humour in Anouilh’s work, or may not.

The brilliant actor Michel Bouquet was Bitos. There is a short piece of old film showing him in costume in his dressing room and then acting a scene from the play. His face alone is remarkable. His wide forehead seems to slant unnaturally backwards while his narrow chin juts forward in a perfect manifestation of hypocrisy in human form. The costume is for the audience’s first view of Bitos: he is arriving at a dinner party where the guests are each taking on the role of a famous revolutionary figure. Naturally, Bitos, responsible for legal cruelties in 1945, is Robespierre. He wears a long overcoat and on his head is a chalk-white, fluffy eighteenth-century wig. Above the wig is a bowler hat. He takes off the long coat and reveals the dandified costume of the famous Left head-lopper, circa 1794. Bitos, in wig, bowler hat and open overcoat with glimpse of sky-blue costume, could have been drawn by Hergé for a Tintin adventure. Today, without too many adjustments, the costume would suit a Monsieur Rudd, or a Monsieur Hollande.

Poor Bitos has been away from our stages for a long time. While its references to now forgotten contemporary political matters have dimmed, Bitos himself, the mid-twentieth-century Tartuffe, has grown bigger while our idea of theatre has grown smaller.