276
MARSHALL COHEN
tween his "point of deviation" and the "call from the other room."
Whiting, like his nuns, is given to false pregnancy.
To make matters worse, Grandier's unilluminating lucubrations
about the meaning of it all are confided to a sententious sewerman who
is certainly the most irritating representative of ordinary humanity
to
hit New York since George Rose appeared in
A Man For AU Seasons.
These insufferable Everyrnen-George Rose is now appearing as the
laconic narrator of
The Royal Hunt of the
Sun----'are becoming one
of the genuine hazards of contemporary theater-going. Fluid, all-purpose
sets are another. The play is a costume drama set in a seventeenth–
century provincial town. But there isn't a suggestion of baroque in
R. Ter-Arutunian's rhubarb of Brunelleschi arcades, nee-Mayan facades
and cantilevered platforms. Michael Cacoyannis' violent and tasteless
commitment to the sexual interpretation of the nuns' behavior empha–
sizes the play's weaknesses by underlining the credulity and even the
downright villainy of Grandier's enemies. Jason Robards' dismaying
performance only adds to the difficulties. For the glamorous, provoca–
tive Grandier, whose very reputation inspires these ambiguous ecstacies,
Robards gives us a befogged somnambulist who takes the unit of mean–
ing to be the syllable. Anne Bancroft's hand-clutching piety and hump–
backed horniness preclude any atmosphere of baroque religiosity or
brooding, impersonal evil. In her struggles against diabolic possession
she displays the same fearlessness in combat that conquered Broadway
when she took on Patty Duke in
The Miracle Worker.
On the night I
saw her (Saturday) she was rewarded with a round of apparently
straightfaced applause after each acrobatic bout, and before the end of the
run she required hospitalization. Miss Bancroft also brings to the part
of Sister Jeanne that well-known Bronx accent that was -so winning in
Gittel Mosca, but which helped transform Mother Courage into a
querulous
Yiddishe Momme.
Anne Bancroft and Jason Robards are,
unquestionably, overrated actors. But the very fact of their reputations
suggests the flatness of the
~urrounding
plain. Their limitations of style
and particularly their defects of speech are characteristic of the Ameri–
can acting establishment. Does this inability
to
speak reflect some
profound national defect? Does it account for the fact that our finest
dramatic achievements were ,once in the silent film 'and are now in
the dance? It is less gloomy to suppose that what is required is some
Balanchine or Graham to impose a discipline on American actors.
Graham's
Clytemnestra
was, incidentally, the most impressive dramatic
event I witnessed
this
winter.
