Anouilh, like Shaw, tends to become a prisoner of his own brilliance; audiences leave some of his conversation-plays so impressed by the wit that they are oblivious to the thought content.
The Tufts Summer Players performance of The Rehearsal ought to convince everyone that the situation isn't helper by reversing the accents. Director Donald Mullin and translator Lucienne Hill have joined in a peculiar kind of conspiracy to conceal from their audience that this is a very witty play. And without the humor, The Rehearsal isn't strong enough to make a go of it.
Miss Hill's contribution was a flat, dull translation, far worse than the other one available in paperback. Mr. Mullin, in addition, has his performers speak in a languid, graceful, hightragedy style. The humor is drowned by pauses that have no reason to be there, by lines that are stuttered over by the oh-so-slow manner of speech used by most of the actors.
The play deals with a count who dresses his house guests up in Louis XV costumes and has them put on a play to amuse his guests at charity ball. The characters are given roles that resemble their real-life roles and they act out their bitterness on the stage. And Anouilh's plot turns out to be very similar to that of the play-within-a-play, Marivaux's Double Inconstancy.
It takes an act and half before we reach the four melodramatic scenes that takes care of the plot; after that three competent actors take over and its' all downhill. The Count (Robert Lanchester) has tolerated his wife's affairs and she has tolerated his. He has a mistress, whom he finds boring. Lucile (Patricia Archer) brings a ray of simplicity into his life; she's a 20-year-old social worker virgin, and he goes nuts for her.
But her simplicity isn't of the Antigone mold; left to a world of deception, she is deceived. The countess persuades Hero (Robert Esckilsen) to lure the count away from the house, make Lucile think he has deserted her, and then seduce her. She runs away in shame the next day, the count runs after her, too late (his wife and friends are sure he'll return to their circle soon).
Mr. Lanchester, whose comic sense is erratic, seems to be a competent straight actor and he keeps the last two acts moving nicely. Miss Archer plays her very difficult role with a great deal of style, and Mr. Esckilsen comes off best of all as the drunkard, obsessed by a Lucile-like girl the count made him give up 20 years before.
In fact the entire company, with the exception of Joan Abrahams' very stilted Countess and John Callahan's painfully inept Damiens, seems quite competent. Mr. Mullin has let them down rather spectacularly, but that's not to say that the rest of Tuft's season won't be better.
