[In the following review, Bentley praises the sets and acting in the 1954 New York production of Colombe.]

Optimistic plays are very depressing. “Too bad reality is different,” you say in the lobby. It takes a pessimistic play to cheer you up. When you say “Life isn't as bad as that” you are half way to declaring that everything in the garden is lovely. The great tonic of the Broadway season is Mademoiselle Colombe by Jean Anouilh, a tale of the futility of boy's meeting girl.

It is a production of many pleasures Boris Aronson's sets alone are worth the trip to the Longacre. This designer, whose reputation is for thoroughness and grandeur, shows himself, here as in My Three Angels, to have as light a touch as anyone in the profession; his joyous wit and controlled fantasy provide a desperately needed alternative to the lush decadence of, say, Oliver Messel or Lemuel Ayres. Aronson's principal exhibit in Colombe is a backstage scene in which Anouilh's peculiar blend of French reality with theatrical unreality is accurately translated into color and shape.

The play is also a showcase for some of our finest acting talent—by which I do not merely mean that some of our best actors are in it, nor yet that it enables them to show themselves off. Edna Best had a better chance to show herself off in Ladies of the Corridor; the authors gave her nothing else to show. Since Miss Best has one of the most charming selves in our theatre, it is pleasant to have her display it—but it is astonishing to have her dispense with charm altogether and get along quite as well without. Miss Best's part in Colombe is that of an aging actress, the boy's mother wholly shrewish and shrill. Miss Best wears a false nose, chalky make-up, and a red wig; struts, gesticulates wildly, and screams her head off; in fact, goes all out; all of which is remarkable at a time when she'd get higher marks for acting if she relaxed and was a bit of a bore. As it was, Miss Best showed the way to the rest of a cast which—except for two performers—Anouilh dresses up as caricatures, outrageous as Hogarth or the Keystone Cops: Sam Jaffe, Harry Bannister, Nehemiah Persoff, and others contribute notable cartoon-portraits. (Mikhail Rasumny is rather unintelligible.)

The exceptions are the boy and the girl through whom a more inward reality is explored. The girl is played by Julie Harris. If my delight over this actress is somewhat belated, I had better admit that I was in Europe when she came to prominence. Astonishing what can happen when one's back is turned! That Miss Harris has the special “offbeat personality” of the newer generation of actresses is the least of it and might well have set me against her. Her personality has the larger strangeness and even (potentially) the grander glamor that go to the making of a Garbo (different as Garbo is). Nor does the final impression come from mere color or timbre of personality. It comes, rather, from Miss Harris' gift, a gift not yet, to be sure, at its fullest development, but nonetheless unspoiled by any of the myriad forces which must have been trying to spoil it. One is afraid for her! She is like one of Anouilh's young women, all sensitive life, while round about is the wicked, insensitive world eager to hurt, not to mention the awful example of Misses X and Y, first ladies of our stage, fifty and forlorn.

Eli Wallach is a favorite actor of mine, but casting him as the hero of Colombe was an audacious bit of “off-casting” which has not succeeded. It is very well to ask a straight comedienne like Miss Best to do a character part, but to ask a character actor like Mr. Wallach to play a juvenile lead? The springy élan and homey vivacity that he has to offer he is compelled to save for one scene—the last. Before that we have to observe him grimly holding himself in or yet more grimly simulating qualities he cannot seem to possess like arrogance and intellectuality. The man who played the part in Paris was possibly a less accomplished actor; he didn't do very much with the part; but there was no complaint about him because he fell into place; it is one of those rather neutral roles. Mr. Wallach, though he works manfully, and always holds the attention (because he is an artist), is the Achilles' heel of the show; and the anti-European newspaper fraternity has aimed to kill.

Achilles is not all heel. Apart from one gamble that didn't come off, Harold Clurman, the director, has played an admirable game. Even the over-emphasis on the hero's badness can broaden one's notion of a play which—however you take it—is both witty and moving. I came away from the Paris production thinking Anouilh had but reiterated his standard theme of desecrated innocence, the only difference this time being that the innocent was a man. The Clurman production makes it clear that Colombe is—with Antigone—one of those more interesting plays of Anouilh in which there is some guilt on both sides of the conflict. The young woman is a very ordinary young woman (to make so ordinary a person so extraordinary on stage being a great joint achievement of Anouilh and Miss Harris), but the young man's superiority is pharasaical. In fact Colombe brings to mind a play that those who dislike Anouilh would dislike even more: Le Misanthrope.

Like Giraudoux, like Brecht, like Goethe, like Racine, like all foreign playwrights, Anouilh has been called untranslatable. So there sets in that process called Adaptation, which commonly means the conquest and destruction of an author by a jealous would-be rival. If the British version of Colombe was not quite that, it was nevertheless full of changes by which the Adaptor vainly sought to justify having his name in the same size type as Anouilh. It is a pleasure to report that the version used in New York—by Louis Kronenberger—is Hyperion to this satyr: more faithful to the original without being less amusing in itself. Following the British precedent, and presumably under instructions from his producers, Mr. Kronenberger did tone down the nausea and pessimism which are most conspicuous in the Edna Best role. In the French she says, “I'm constipated and I've 200 alexandrines to learn by tomorrow.” In withholding this from the play, I can only hope Mr. Kronenberger is saving it for his next piece (in Time) on Miss X or Miss Y.

There were other small things to grumble about, such as an awkward transition to the last scene in which the PA system is ineffectively and indistinctly used. But by and large, it is a splendid evening, and you leave the theatre full of the hope that M. Anouilh's hopelessness inevitably engenders.