Stage Abroad: Cher Jean

The Paris theater currently has two—and only two—real hits. One of them, Hair, is in its 24th week. The other, which just opened, is Jean Anouilh’s Cher Antoine. Any play by France’s most widely performed modern playwright is bound to be bitingly witty and polished to a high gloss; this one, Anouilh’s 28th, is even more so, and the critics were unreservedly delighted.

“Cher Antoine is a masterpiece,” cheered France Soir. “A complete masterpiece, profound, sparkling, subtle, naive, poetic, comic, full of resonance.” Wrote Le Figaro: “Anyone who doesn’t like this piece knows nothing about human beings, has no love for the theater, can’t recognize an author of talent and lacks a sense of humor.”

Poisoned Darts. Anouilh’s hero, Antoine de St. Flour, is dead when the curtain rises. A famed French playwright who retired from the world to a Bavarian Schloss on his 50th birthday, he has been killed in a shotgun accident that may have been a suicide. A group of characters from his past have been summoned for the reading of the will. They make up a nicely varied assortment: two ex-wives—one of them an old dreadnought of an actress superbly played by Françoise Rosay—three mistresses and three men, including a dyspeptic theater critic, jealous of Antoine’s sexual and professional success.

Their complaints, tender memories and snide remarks about the deceased evoke the contradictory aspects of Antoine’s character. In the second act he materializes onstage, rehearsing a group of actors in his last play. To be performed for himself alone, it is about how his relatives and friends will react to his death. In the play-within-the-play (a favorite Anouilh device), the characters and their lines are identical with those of the first act but enriched by Antoine’s commenting presence.

The third act is an epilogue in which a plaque is unveiled in honor of the dead playwright, who has presumably gone to the grave without revealing the existence of his last prophetic play. The dialogue rains poisoned darts on love, marriage, friendship and bourgeois values, making Cher Antoine a precision-tooled piece of lapidary Gallic wit.

Passion for Privacy. Numerous parallels between Antoine and his creator have invited suggestions that this is a strongly autobiographical play. The last person likely to shed light on this question is Anouilh himself. At 59, looking like an aging bank clerk, with blank blue eyes behind silver-rimmed spectacles, he makes a fetish of privacy. It was three years before the world knew that he had divorced and remarried in 1953; his telephone numbers are unlisted and frequently change; and to keep his whereabouts secret, he shuttles back and forth between an apartment in Paris, a suburban house, a place in the country and a retreat in Switzerland where he does a lot of his writing.

Only the actors and essential stage hands are allowed in the theater during Anouilh’s rehearsals, and everyone involved in an Anouilh production is generally expected to maintain strict silence about the play. On first nights he hides in a corner of the theater. As usual, after the opening of Cher Antoine, he slipped quietly out of the house before the applause began and shuffled off into the night, without taking a curtain call.