Five Plays: Antigone, Eurydice, the Ermine, Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeanette, Vol. 1 Book

I knew very little about Jean Anouilh before picking up this old Hill and Wang paperback collection of five of his plays--my main reason for grabbing it in the first place was a desire to get better acquainted with dramatists in general, and this fifty-cent, library-sale discard looked like a good way to do that. It probably wasn't until after I bought it, and after doing a little bit of research, that I learned anything about Anouilh--which still wasn't much: Antigone seemed to be the play he was best known for, and that play--a retelling of the last of the Theban cycle--was associated with the French Resistance.

Being of a certain age, the French resistance against the occupation of Nazi Germany holds a kind of popular appeal for me--never mind that my impressions of it are more than likely a lot of uninformed nonsense. So the idea of retelling this already powerful play and adapting it to the (then) contemporary circumstances seemed very intriguing. Unfortunately, this translation by Lewis Galantière did not live up to my expectations--and I make a specific point of the translation because, as I was to find out later, (after doing a little more research), that Galantière took it upon himself to remove some of the ambiguity inherent in the original, and thus to make the play more palatable for American audiences. (In the course of my research, I found a thesis posted on line where the author addresses this very charge. I found it interesting, though it might have a limited appeal. Anyone interested can view it here: SURVIVING ANTIGONE: ANOUILH, ADAPTATION AND THE ARCHIVE by Katelyn J. Buis)

At any rate, there is no doubt that Anouilh found the translation troubling. An aspect that I found fascinating was that, according to Buis, the original audience for Antigone, a mixture of German officers and French citizens, understood the play to be Pro-Vichy or Pro-Resistance, depending on which ever view they already held. In other words, the play's ambiguity allowed for each audience member to imprint their own views on the larger circumstances onto the stage. Galantière's translation, on the other hand, was an attempt to place the play firmly in the pro-resistance camp, presumably with the idea that, now that the war was over, people wouldn't want to be confronted with this kind of uncertainty.

It might be a mistake to draw too many conclusions from the relative success of each version, as there are too many variables to keep track of, but it does make me wonder when the American production folded rather rapidly and the French production was a resounding success. I also began to wonder about the translation I read because, after finishing, I was ambivalent about it in general. Without spending a lot more money than I'm inclined to, it's doubtful I'll ever find a French version of this play with which to compare, though I would like to see just how much difference there is between the two. Buis, in her thesis, gives some examples, though not enough for me to be sure if the difference is as much as is reported. There is, too, the fact that I have not seen the play staged--and that might make all the difference.

As to the play itself--it's been a long time since I read Sophocles, but Anouilh's take on it made, to me, a much more positive character out of Cleon, the tyrant of Thebes, who gives the order that the body of Polynices--the son of Oedipus who fought his brother Eteocles for control of Thebes--remain on the battlefield where it fell, without the proper burial rites, which would consign him to wander restlessly throughout eternity. Antigone, the sister, is committed to seeing her brother buried, and is willing to risk death in order to do the right thing. As the crux of the play revolves around the question of submission to authority, I think it's easy to see how this subject could be adapted to many different situations, and despite questions about the translation, it still seems to me that there is some ambiguity involved, as I found myself sympathetic to Cleon, seeing Anouilh's Antigone as a somewhat self-absorbed and melodramatic. This could very well be a function of my age though.

In the course of my research, I also found that three other plays by Anouilh besides Antigone are listed as part of Harold Bloom's Western Canon, two of which are included in this volume: Eurydice and The Rehearsal (the third, in another of Hill and Wang's paperback collections, is Beckett). Eurydice is a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a contemporary setting, and that one and the others (The Ermine, The Rehearsal and Romeo and Jeannette) have an insistent theme of the difficulties between lovers. Anouilh resists easy answers, his characters are not stock. Much of the drama tends to center around two people who find an instant attraction for one another, but then must find a way to accept the flawed (sometimes sordid) past of their new lover. That although this new love is something greater than either one has ever experienced, one of them (usually the male) feels the need to make the other's past conform to this same ideal, which it fails miserably to do.

Anouilh's dialogue does not seem to suffer from the same kind of 'staginess' that I find in a lot of dramas I read, though there is some. And sometimes it can be melodramatic. But I thought it was well worth reading, even though I was a little underwhelmed with Antigone. At this age, I often saw the difficulties of the characters in a rather unforgiving light--I felt like saying 'all this that you are so worried about doesn't matter!', but try telling that to any young person engaged in an emotion-driven affair. I've become the sort of person who says, 'yes, I was that way once too, but you'll think differently about it when you're my age'. So take that into consideration. 3.5 stars