Volume 27, Number 19 · December 4, 1980
Children of Paradise
By Michael Wood
Theater and Revolution: The Culture of the French Stage
by Frederick Brown
Viking, 490 pp., $20.00
Thoughts of the theater in France are apt to conjure up a frozen seventeenth century. Actors of the Comédie-Française, the house of Molière, strut the stage in period costumes and ringletted wigs, declaiming swatches of impeccable rhyming verse. It is an image which does less than justice to the Comédie-Française; and it ignores whole zones of French theatrical life: the Théâtre National Populaire, the boulevards, the provinces, dozens of little theaters, several remarkable ensembles, extraordinary performances of Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Jarry, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet. Nevertheless, the image retains a certain force, because a powerful mythology, nourished as much by its enemies as by its adherents, skulks behind it.
Review, 3027 words
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