[In the following unfavorable review of the 1964 New York production of Traveller without Luggage, Clurman argues that the play “shows some of the salient features of Anouilh's personality and an attitude which were to place him in the front rank of French playwrights between the late thirties and the fifties.”]

Since Jean Anouilh's Traveller without Luggage has suffered, as have many other French plays in the past, in being transferred from the boulevards to Broadway, I shall not dwell on its production at the Anta Theatre. The cast includes several talented actors—Ben Gazzara, Mildred Dunnock, Rae Allen, to name only three—and there are some well-played passages, notably in the second scene, but the right tone is never found. This is largely due to the very real difficulty that confronts American actors and directors who try to realize the exact nature of French behavior. They are removed from the cultural environment of such plays, and even their earnest efforts to suggest it therefore seem like affectation in moments of comedy, and the ungainly “emotionalism” in more dramatic exchanges.

The text itself is interesting in several respects. Written in 1937 when its author was 27, it was his first success. Though by no means his best play, Traveller without Luggage shows some of the salient features of Anouilh's personality and an attitude which were to place him in the front rank of French playwrights between the late thirties and the fifties.

Anouilh despises the world that bred him—the “wondrous time” before the First World War (1900-14), the last period of bourgeois security in France. The war was to explode many of the myths about the proverbial worth and refinement of its civilization. If there was truth in any of these myths, it could be substantiated after the war only by an acknowledgment of the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the old bourgeoisie. And that class became the particular object of Anouilh's hatred.

The war-injured amnesiac of Traveller without Luggage, attempting to recall the conditions of life from which the shock of his wound cut him off, slowly discovers the rottenness of a life that contributed in no small measure to his own wretched character. He sees himself the product of a world that was mean, egotistic, snobbish, frivolous, cruel, sex-obsessed and loveless. Venomous scorn for the wealthy French middle class (as well as for the still lingering remnants of a well-heeled aristocracy) permeates most of Anouilh's work like an acid. The only redemption for a man born of that world is to reject it utterly. In Traveller without Luggage, anathematizing his past, Anouilh became a typical voice of a whole generation in a similar state of revulsion.

Anouilh—fortunately and unfortunately—has been unable to discard the luggage of the past. There is a good deal of a particular kind of French sentimentality in Anouilh's disillusionment; it has the taste of a rancid romanticism. There are also traces of a nobility whose antecedents are in an older (seventeenth-century) tradition mixed with a certain stored national experience. This produces a striking canniness (healthy in a Montaigne), which in Anouilh sometimes expresses itself as worldly wisdom and a peppery humor, and sometimes as a rather petty cynicism. All this is significant because the dramatist shares these traits with a very large segment of his compatriots.

Among the still serviceable things that Anouilh has inherited from the past is a sure sense of the stage. He is a consummate craftsman. Part of Anouilh's superb theatrical equipment is his ability to borrow and make new use of the staples of classic comedy—the oldest devices from Plautus through Molière to vaudeville. The surprise ending of Traveller without Luggage—in which the man who in horror wishes to escape his newly recovered family, and seizes upon a new family found by “poetic” license in a little boy—is a case in point. This is in itself a telling image and it turns an acrid and not very plausible tale into something beguiling.

The most genuine facet of Anouilh is his gift for artifice. All his plays are basically fables, contrivances of brilliantly imaginative showmanship, full of surprises and fascinating sleight-of-hand. Whatever his intentions, they often serve fundamentally serious ends.

The critical pendulum has swung from revering Anouilh as one of the “great” dramatists of our day to dismissing him as a highly skilled cheap-Jack (Anouilh has recently taken to disclaiming any exalted artistic aim). I myself veer from admiration to distrust. There is something meretricious in Anouilh's soulfulness and aching idealism. But, aside from his unmistakable adroitness, his adult shrewdness, independence, rebelliousness and corruption, mixed with the rich humanistic substance bequeathed by his country and which he seems to love with considerable resentment, make him representative of his time and place and give him an individual face. All this will finally be found to have value and will surely count when the overestimation of his excellence becomes as obsolete as are the too drastic denunciations of his defects.