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Paris Theater: The Best Plays Outside the City
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12434 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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7 / 1987 |
2,384 Words |
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Joseph Fitchett
Joseph Fitchett, a correspondent for the International Herald
Tribune has an ongoing interest in the arts. |
The venerable grande dame of the French stage, Madeleine Renaud, eighty-seven, seemed to make her performance more exciting each evening last winter as Winnie in Oh! Les Beaux Jours (-Happy days), Samuel Beckett's celebrated play. Buried to her neck in a sand dune - a concrete symbol for being mired in the human condition - Renaud performs as a virtual one-woman show. She monologues a talkative, sentimental old woman - building from an almost Pollyanna-like gaiety to a powerful dramatic climax.
Renaud has conceived for her character a complete back story in order to play her character of Winnie. "It was and always will be my greatest role," she says. This sense of what Winnie's early life must have been enables her to infuse Beckett's spare text with a remarkable density, making the play more accessible, perhaps, than any other work of his. Renaud, who created the part twenty-five-years ago in the original production directed by the late Roger Blin (and in which Jean-Louis Barrault played the bit part of Winnie's husband), today draws a full house whenever the play turns up in the repertory of the Renaud-Barrault. Their theater, a beehive of theatrical activity, is located in the old remodeled skating rink at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysees.
Burst of Revolutionary Fervor
Through the decades, Renaud and her husband Jean-Louis Barrault have been acting in and directing their own company in one major theater or another in Paris. In the immediate postwar years they were quartered in the prestigious Theatre Marigny, nest door to the Elysees Palace. In the sixties, they moved over to the Left Bank to the Theatre l'Odeon, a national
... (1996 of 14266 Characters)
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