Paris Theater: The Stage

An evening at the humorous but amateurish Chicago production of Promises, Promises reminded me that the last truly memorable pieces I had seen on the American stage were Hadrian VII with Hume Cronyn and the Chicago Old Town Players’ rendition of Jack Richardson’s The Prodigal. Promises, Promises also recalled my promise (in this column of July 17) to supplement my discussion of the French cinema with an article on the current Parisian stage—whose vitality contrasts so markedly with its American counterpart.

“But the French stage is dirty and immoral!” cries the reader who had the misfortune to suffer through a “Paris by Night” segment in his guided tour of Gay Paree. Actually, it is no fairer to evaluate the French legitimate theater (which few non-Frenchmen ever attend, owing to the language barrier) on the basis of cheap nightclub acts than it would be to prejudge Hadrian VII by way of Las Vegas nightspots. The stage production of most questionable taste in Paris today happens to be the American import Hair, and it has elicited a response that would be hard to imagine in our own country, where we have come to accept “Woodstock” operations as part of the cultural landscape: playwright René Ehni, already famous for his mockery of the left-wing intelligentsia in Que Ferez-Vous en Novembre?, brought out a new play, Super-Positions, in which the mentality of those who create productions like Hair is surgically analyzed and exposed to ridicule.

In point of fact, the Paris legitimate theater remains the best in the world. For every Hadrian VII in the United States and every 40 Years On in London, there are scores of plays each season in Paris that encourage—or even force—the theatergoer to rethink his existence. Why is this? In part the answer is (and I hope my rightest readers ponder it well, especially those who in Indiana even opposed federal aid to public libraries) that the French state directly subsidizes the theater through its Ministry of Culture!

More vital as an explanatory factor for the quality of the Parisian stage is the remarkable lucidity of the French mind at its best (the quality termed “Cartesian spirit”). Descartes’s insistence that everything be made clear and explicit—deriving from the classical precision of the orthodox Christian theological thinking from which Descartes ironically departed—has colored the French mentality to such an extent that art is invariably made to wrestle seriously with ultimate questions. Even Frenchmen such as Camus who drank deeply at the founts of non-rational existentialism have been incapable of achieving the intellectual turgidity of a Heidegger! How many American playwrights, whose perspectives seem to have difficulty rising above the levels of nudity and profanity, could analyze their task as Roger Planchon did his work of reviving Racine’s Bérénice? Said he in a Le Monde interview in April, criticizing the very fallacy that theologians of the New Hermeneutic have baptized with their “hermeneutical circle”: We must “come properly to grips with the work itself” and not be “content to use the classic as a mouthpiece or echo-chamber for our own ideas.”

“Granting all this,” our critic retorts, “isn’t the Parisian theater largely devoted either to depressing descriptions of the human predicament, without a hint of a solution, or to idealistic and perfectionistic expressions (as in escapist operettas) that go to the opposite extreme?” But one must distinguish lack of explicit solution to man’s predicament from hopelessness. Many current French stage pieces offer man “no exit” (to use Sartre’s famous phrase) but so clearly distinguish the nature of his malady from naïve and false diagnoses that they constitute a first step toward cure.

For example, Jean Anouilh’s Les Poissons Rouges strikes directly at the fundamental Marxist fallacy that man’s problems, like the state, can “winnow away” through the establishment of a classless society. The hero of the play is, by his background, education, and upbringing, a superior person, and therefore all those who have contact with him wish to whittle him down to their size, by giving him a guilty conscience for having genuine ability. The message? Literary critic Poirot-Delpech rightly catches it: “The playwright is convinced that since innate differences are stronger than differences of wealth or social rank, there will always be one man who seems to be getting the best of it; he becomes the other man’s bourgeois and incurs his revenge.”

The Paris revival of Henry de Montherlant’s historical drama Malatesta stresses the self-deception of man. The despicable fifteenth-century condottiere and all those associated with him—“even those who are thought to be the salt of the earth” (these are the playwright’s words)—display “the generalized blindness of human beings. One should never forget that Julius Caesar, who was a genius, bequeathed enormous sums to his murderers.” Ionesco’s Amédée, subtitled “How to Get Rid of It” (i.e., a corpse that mysteriously appears in an apartment and then commences to grow in size until it completely fills the living space, brings the theatergoer an even more profound analysis: sin cannot be evaded, though humans try to do so either by assuming blasé pseudo-indifference or by childishly refusing to face up to the nightmare of their existence.

The lesson that honesty concerning oneself is the first step to salvation is preached in Un Sale Egoїste, starring Paul Meurisse as a superlative “dirty egoist.” He differs from others only in that he is willing to admit his egoism. His only close friend is the abbé (“someone I can understand: a true egoist,” declares the hero); after all, the “Christian martyrs weren’t unselfish—they got an exultation from sacrifice.” Precisely: Christianity does not idealistically pretend that unselfishness is possible; it ruthlessly faces it so that it can be redeemed. At the end of the play the possibility of such redemption opens to the egoist through the love of a girl who, like him, sees the heart of man as it really is.

Are Paris operettas superficial? Some, surely, but not all. Tino Rossi, a popular singer for over a generation, has been starring as Le Marchand de Soleil at the Mogador, and he merchandises not only sun but pre-evangelism. The merchant is a Christ-figure who turns “deus ex machina” into a way of life! He appears out of nowhere to solve the insoluble again and again. Effectively, the production works into it Rossi’s most famous song, the Christmas tune, “Petit Papa Noël.” Sing the children of this world to Father Christmas, the Christ-figure par excellence: “When you come down from heaven with your gifts by the thousands, don’t forget me. I haven’t been very good, but please forgive me.” Our Lord tells us that the door to the Kingdom is open only to those who become as little children: children in recognizing their need, children in seeking God’s answer outside themselves. The Paris theater, by God’s common grace, silhouettes these truths.

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