Theater: The Guillotine Complex

Poor Bitos, by Jean Anouilh. A game played for real is either war or murder. In France, the game of politics is a visceral sport. Poor Bitos hinges on this sport, but American playgoers may respond more to its fascinating intellectuality than to its somewhat alien passions.

Anouilh puts his characters into wigs, and they traverse the centuries back to the French Terror of 1793. The play begins ten years after the end of World War II. Maxime (Charles D. Gray), a rich aristocratic rightist, decides to hold a wig party in a Gothic catacomb of a cellar. All his guests are to come as leading figures of the Revolution. Maxime himself plays Saint-Just. Other friends play Danton, Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI (“virtually a nonspeaking role”) and the Comte de Mirabeau. The butt of the party is to be Bitos (Donald Pleasence), the local deputy prosecutor, an ex-classmate of Maxime’s and the son of a washerwoman. He comes as Robespierre.

Bitos commits a characteristic faux pas by appearing in full costume. This also attests the nature of the man, a small-minded, bloody-minded egotist, seething with inner fury and monumentally insecure, inflexible and prideful. Maxime and his friends hate Bitos for his lowly origins, for the brainy diligence that made him first in school and for the fanaticism with which he is hounding and executing wartime collaborationists.

In Act I, the others bait him mercilessly, though Bitos proves to be a snarly rodent with fangs.

In Act II, history takes stage center as Bitos actually becomes Robespierre. There are tableaux of the boy being caned by a Jesuit schoolmaster for his stiff-necked pride, of Robespierre as a humorless young parliamentary Stalin outraging the more moderate Mirabeau (“You’ve taught me a very sad thing, which is that the Revolution could be a bore”), of Robespierre dictating new decrees of death in a last mad spasm of guillotine-hungry power.

Act III returns to the present and a Bitos, fuddled with drink, being prepared for one last humiliation. A woman who has refused Bitos’ offer of marriage pities him enough to warn him to leave the house before the final indignity. Without a word of gratitude, Bitos turns on his heel with graceless implacability (“If I can ever get my own back on you all one day, you are the one I shall begin with”). This is Anouilh at his most psychologically astute, recognizing that a man may endure all sorts of barbs aimed at his social class or ideological allegiance, but that he cannot forgive a woman who rejects him for himself alone.

While the play makes Maxime and his friends as mean-spirited as Bitos, it sides somewhat with the aristocrats. Those born to power may be corrupt, Anouilh seems to argue, but they know how to rule and they can dispassionately temper justice with mercy. But the arrivistes of power, the burning incorruptible zealots like Bitos-Robespierre, pursue justice so obsessively that they end up being savagely unjust. Anouilh masterfully unfolds the psychology of the revolutionary mentality, with its abstract love of “humanity” but contempt for individual men, together with the secret snobbery of the proletarian leader who greatly prizes the good opinion of the class he wants to exterminate.

Anouilh perhaps distorts history by making Robespierre no more than Bitos. Allowing that the will to power may begin as a desire for social revenge, as Anouilh believes, even the monsters of history acquire the grandeur of history’s stage. An evil genie cannot be reduced to, or explained by, the bottle from which it came. Anouilh’s Robespierre lacks size. And if men are not all black and white, it is even more difficult to swallow Anouilh’s misanthropic contention that they are all black and black, however wittily or trenchantly phrased.

In the phenomenally difficult role of Bitos-Robespierre, Donald Pleasence is phenomenally good. He is a one-man seminar of the acting art, capturing every shading of the role from social unease to icy cruelty. He even bites his fingernails as if dreaming of heavenly guillotines. The scrofulous bum of The Caretaker has become the holy terrorist of the French Revolution.