The Theater: New Play on Broadway, Dec. 21, 1959

The Fighting Cock (adapted from the French of Jean Anouilh by Lucienne Hill) reveals an Anouilh more balanced than bitter in mood, and more effective as a philosophe than as a playwright. His play is an often witty variant on a persisting theme, perhaps all the more persisting because it poses an insoluble question. The Fighting Cock concerns a retired general disgusted by a world he finds filled with "cheats" and lost to honor. He would like to stir up a movement to get rid of the "maggots." Against this testy idealist rooted in the past, Anouilh sets a number of figures who accept the way of the world, sometimes with an eye to the future. A radical laborer and a reactionary aristocrat, a pretty young wife (Natasha Parry) and a clever young man assail or try to enlighten the general, not because he dreams but because his dreams have gone out of fashion.

The play nicely balances its blunderer from an age of chivalry against the more practical citizenry of an age of compromise. It is an altogether Anouilhan balance, in that it finds much to be said against both sides. But where Anouilh, a worldly observer with both heart and spleen, shows a certain contempt for the riders of bandwagons, he mocks his knight with compassion. And where, in earlier and bitterer mood, Anouilh set his version of Moliere's surly misanthrope against a too complaisant world, his hero in The Fighting Cock comes closer to Cervantes' cracked Don.

Perhaps no playwright today is more gifted than Anouilh at creating little dialectical monologues or variety turns, at giving a mockingbird's-eye view of a given subject. Dotted with bright remarks, The Fighting Cock half a dozen times foams up into pointed or picturesque little scenes. But instead of a sense of fermentation beneath the foam, there is a good deal of dramatic flatness. It is not so much that the play finds no destination as that it fails to dramatize the very lack of one. What The Fighting Cock needed, in the face of an all but preordained intellectual stalemate, was a greater emotional leverage, a more vibrant dramatic charge. Rex Harrison is a top actor and Peter Brook a top director. But whether it is the part's fault or the player's, the general is not an expressive enough figure. And whether it is the production's fault or the play's, The Fighting Cock needs both more thrust and more evocativeness, a right blending of the aromatic and the astringent. A mood induced by Rolf Gerard's sets is not sustained, and neither, for all the play's good things, is the audience's interest.