Waltz of The Toreadors

There are plays and plays. Some should not be adapted or altered for performance on stage, but equally, there are other plays that positively need to be clamped down to a specific interpretation. Anouilh's "Waltz of the Toreadors" is one of the latter kind and suffers when a director is not willing to take liberties with the material, to chop and focus on some particular human experience.

Not that there are not ample hints in the text of possible directions towards which the play could have been pitted. One such is the line towards the end of the play delivered by Dr. Bonfant, "One must never understand one's enemies . . . One must never understand anyone for that matter or one will die of it." This strikes a theme so rich, with its Hamlet-like overtones and its implications about the difficulties of taking violent revolutionary political action that a play constructed around it could have been immensely profitable.

As Robert Chapman directs it, however, almost all potential dramatic points are diligently dissipated so one is left with no more than a sagging semi-tragic bedroom farce.

Worse, the play is done straight, in full color period dresses and with immaculate props, in short the full Shaw treatment. And this is a grotesque mis-application because, among other reasons, Shaw is supremely logical in his plays with all the events and incidents falling sensibly into place, while Anouilh is not.

On a mechanical level Anouilh feels no need to explain how the letters to Bonfant find their way into Madame Mlle, de Ste. Euverte's hands, on a textual level he feels no qualms about using the term 'soul' to explain contradictory situations. When Anouilh wants to indulge in a dissertation about 'honor' he so indulges, forming such a situation even though nothing of the resulting discussion between the General and his Secretary is coherently related to the characters or the action of the rest of the play. This is not a fault--it is just another style of writing plays, one that is circuitous and whimsical, full of zany cynical asides for their own sake. Anouilh has a European mind and Chapman's attempt to fit it into the straight-forward Anglo-Saxon mold is disastrous.

Thus the General, played by Ronald Hunter, is kept fulminating for the whole time at a steady roar--the wit of so many of his lines gets lost in the over-blown bustle. This is not the actor's fault but follows from the director's faulty conception of the play. Hunter is more controlled in the scene (in both senses of the word) with his bedridden wife (Sheila Hart).

The cruelty of their lines to each other is intensified by the mutual fear that the actors convey. Sheila Hart starts out sounding like Paul McCartney's grandfather in "A Hard Day's Night", but soon turns chillingly vicious.

Gaston, is played engagingly by Ross Bickel and minces and shuffles as a nervous adolescent nincompoop. The other actors are competent as is to be expected but none of them is memorable.

The lavish sets, again remarkably similar to the sets used for the Shaw play, are dull and unoriginal.

All in all the play, being unfaithful to its author, is unsatisfying. But many people seemed to enjoy it and it might be entertaining.