Giradoux and Anouilh Now Star in New York

By William F. McDermott

The French are being well-represented on the current New York stage. Jean Giradoux is probably the best of modern French playwrights. He died not long ago. Last week his play, "Ondine," opened on Broadway. It is a kind of fairy tale. Since the late war, the French seem to be concentrating on fairy tales, or other forms of escape drama. But so are the British.

We have a delightful fairy tale in "The Four Colonels," a play from England which is now running at the Cleveland Play House. The strange thing about some of these fables is that they are more adult and sophisticated than most plays which deal with so-called reality.

I wonder about these generalities and these words which are without much meaning. We talk about "escapist" and "escapism" and the implication is that they are somehow evil or undesirable. They are the root and branch of the theater and all other arts. When I say that the French are now concentrating on escape drama, I overlook the fact that Sacha Guitry never wrote a play that was not an "escape" drama. He wrote 40 WILLIAM F. or 50 of them and not one of them ever came MCDERMOTT into grasp with the realities of life. They were all fairy stories expressed often in cynical terms and dealing with a dull and Who remembers a repetitious discussion of sex relationships. play by Sacha Guitry? In your recollection you can't separate one from the other. They are all the same play under different titles. Sex and more sex. Triviality and cleverness.

Bernstein More Popular Henri Bernstein died the other day. I saw no mention of him whatever on the editorial pages and only a few sentences in the columns his reporting death. Yet Bernstein was a far more popular author in America than Sacha Guitry. He wrote "The Thief" which had a good run in the American theater of long ago.

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He wrote dozens of plays, some of them touching and admirable, such as "Melo," which I saw in France about the year 1930. Gaby Morlay was the star, as I remember and she broke your heart.

imagine an American with the courage of trying to write a play in the French language, one of the most precise and difficult of all languages?

French Influence

But let us return to the subject of the extraordinary French influence in the New York theater. One of the most interesting new plays in New York, as 1 gather from the reviews, is "The Immoralist,' 'taken from a novel by Andre Gide.

M. Gide was an unhappy, demoralized man who was probably the greatest French writer of our time. He seems to have been a homosexual and he was once a Communist, though he later withdrew from that church of atheism.

I do not know whether or not this play was imported to America. I do know that I never saw it here. Bernstein was a noted "The Immoralist" is partly a duelist. Maybe that dates him. story of his life dramatized by He also made the mistake of the exceptionally skillful Ruth trying to write plays in the and Augustus Goetz who made English language. They hadn't the memorable translation of much success. But can you (Continued on Page 47-D)