[In the following review, Hayes provides an unfavorable assessment of the 1954 New York production of Colombe.]

Mlle Colombe, the fifth of Jean Anouilh's plays to achieve the condition of an American failure, has provoked a fresh rash of critical speculation on the international dissimilarities of theatrical taste. A small quantity of this analysis has been responsible and illuminating, but too much of it sententious and niggardly, designed to reinforce a heedless public in its indulgent prejudices. Myself, I suspect one need not go so far afield in determining the cause for this failure: the fault, dear Broadway, lies not in the French but in ourselves, and our curious impercipience to the particular weight and quality of M. Anouilh's world. We have had, since the war, productions of Antigone, Legend of Lovers, Ring Round the Moon, and Cry of the Peacock, but each has been either understatement, overstatement or misstatement: closest to the mark was perhaps the rococo fantasy of Christopher Fry's version of Ring Round the Moon. Now, Mlle Colombe, which—even in Louis Kronenberger's fastidious translation—disappoints, but provocatively, so that we are constantly forced to reshape its raw material into an original image which has somehow become deformed and obscure.

Characteristically, Anouilh's plays are songs of innocence and experience. They proceed, and achieve their dramatic tension, by the juxtaposition of what Maurice Valency has called “the purity of the ideal and the degradation of the individual in the material world.” The playwright's authentic and formidable distinction lies, however, in his talent for giving these two states a rich particularity, inexhaustibly vivacious and glittering, and redeemed at every juncture from banality or a casual cynicism. Mlle Colombe, to instance one case, is a cool and simple portrait of the vanity of love: it turns solely on the tragedy of an idealistic young man who loses his “dove” in a squalid, chattering, vivid nest of theatrical eagles, mistress of which is his mother, a truly grotesque old harridan embattled in age and craft and power: a kind of Madame DeFarge of the Boulevards, dropping slushy Alexandrines in a rich, plummy voice while she lops off the heads, hearts, hopes of all about her. Yet the “morality” of the slice-of-life to which M. Anouilh exposes us is so discreet, so embedded in the action, that every resource of intellect and sensibility must be sharpened to point up its bitter contrasts. The playwright is concerned with tragedy, not melodrama, and so he withholds comment: that task, as one critic has observed, he leaves to our consciences.

It is precisely in the realization of these nuances, echoes, that Harold Clurman's direction seems to me to falter. No American director is more sensitive to moral ambiguities and refractions than Mr. Clurman, yet he seems to have read Mlle Colombe as but another portrait of the romantic will discovering itself. To do so is to miss most of the play's bitter rue, the stain of sadness which deepens and spreads throughout it. Anouilh's humor, for example, cannot be merely grotesque: it must leave an aftertaste of disgust in the mouth, just as the fragrant charm of his heroines must visibly tarnish before our eyes.

Partly, too, the meanings of Mlle Colombe are blunted by crucial errors in casting. Eli Wallach, however distinguished his talents, simply cannot summon the style or finish necessary for a role of this sort. And Julie Harris, though never guilty of anything slovenly or common or inartistic, stays well within the range she so brilliantly defined in I Am a Camera. Her present performance represents no significant development of what is perhaps the most impressive young American talent on view. It falls to Edna Best to give Anouilh's creation the fullest realization, and her showy, strident domination of a difficult part delights the mind and the senses as thoroughly as it dismays the heart. No one will deny that the failure of Mlle Colombe still exceeds immeasurably the success of many a lesser play, but the present production has also the unfortunate effect of nurturing the illusion that Anouilh is a sauce too subtle and exotic for our robust, hearty and oh! so unexceptionable American taste.