The Theater: Old Play in Manhattan, Oct. 27, 1958

Lorenzaccio (by Alfred de Musset) launched a three-week visit of France’s Theatre National Populaire—a people’s theater which under the adventurous leadership of Jean Vilar has become popular indeed. Though French dramas of greater fame—Moliere’s Don Juan, Corneille’s Le Cid—were to follow it on Broadway. Musset’s 124-year-old romantic tragedy made a booming opening gun. For one thing, despite its many-pronged story and far too many scenes, Lorenzaccio has considerable operatic stir, psychological lure and ironic force; for another, in the economical way that this Lorenzaccio takes on both life and luster, it provides a lesson in staging.

A study in disillusionment, the play tells how republican Lorenzo de Medici, by playing the weakling and pimp, has the chance to kill the debauched, despotic Duke of Florence, only to find that the new Duke is as worthless as the old. In a role that is superficially as neurotic and high-souled and weak, and is as full of dissembling and soliloquy, as Hamlet’s, Gerard Philipe played with great effect. If possibly overstressed, Lorenzaccio’s effeteness stood in vivid contrast to Philippe Noiret’s gruffly selfish Duke. Such performances were part of a simple but eloquent stage world—the absence of scenery made up for by brilliant lighting and costumes, the multitude of scenes moving fluidly one into another. And Lorenzaccio was. save here and there, beautifully spoken: if, as André Gide remarked, the French language is a piano without pedals, it can yet have great clarity and purity of tone.