[In the following review, Clurman gives a mixed assessment of the 1973 New York production of The Waltz of the Toreadors, deeming the drama “the play which reveals most of Anouilh's essential traits in perfect balance.”]

The Waltz of the Toreadors, produced in Paris in 1952 and a failure then, perhaps because it was not sufficiently cut and also because the author himself directed it, has since been successfully done in London and New York. It is, in my view, the play which reveals most of Anouilh's essential traits in perfect balance.

Anouilh is a romantic idealist whose idealism plagues him. He yearns for purity, nobility, moral courage, glory, but discerns little but pettiness, chicanery, deception and vice. Life riles him because it isn't consistent; he abhors the bulk of humanity because it professes virtues it doesn't practice. There is something comic in this and a great measure of “fun,” but though he is able to laugh at it, it upsets his vitals. He is a sentimentalist become bitter because everything he beholds, everything that has happened to him since he first conceived of the loveliness of experience—especially in matters of love—has proved false and vain.

Oh, if it were only not so, Anouilh's plays seem to wail—beauty not despoiled, grandeur not debased, purity not debauched. But since it is so, we must make the best of it in humankind's shabby fashion, bedecking ourselves in social courtesies, official pomp and at best in common-sense compromise. Once in a long while some splendid gesture or leap of the soul, like a lark in the sky, momentarily redeems us.

This makes Anouilh both a conservative and a cynic. He will not budge from his safe position—“agin” everything except the Ideal. He endures life with a grimace of disgust, a salty chuckle, an ache of regret, and above all with sharp-edged practical shrewdness. The latter feature produces his formidable stage craftsmanship.

The Waltz of the Toreadors is an acidulous bonbon, a despondent farce. Within its coruscating invention, its delightful trickery, its rib-tickling skepticism, there also dwells something subtly tender, softly sighing. The colors of Vuillard and Bonnard surround it; a fragrance of old-time corruption, elegance and bourgeois crassness, decorum and dissoluteness emanates from it. An echo of sweet romance as the French from 1875 to 1900 dreamed of it—a kind of domestic or village romance—wafts through it.

You can still find some of this in the Circle in the Square production, but there is a Broadway alloy in it. It lacks a Gallic vista, that of genuine cultivation endowed with a sense of the past and of the distance which separates our crudities from the quaint and gentler gaucheries of a bygone day.

There is always something winning in Eli Wallach's performances, but the childlike aspirant who resides within the General he plays in The Waltz is not a jumpy boy but an imposing cavalry officer, a conspicuously masculine figure, “a gentleman of the old military academy,” and in the weakness, contradictions, confusions and lostness of such a man is the cream of Anouilh's sorry jest. Wallach only approximates it.

Anne Jackson does many amusing things as the General's harridan wife. These diminish only when Brian Murray's direction falters in bite and snap to accommodate “psychological” nuances which are not in the play's proper vein.

Clarke Dunham's setting is handsome, but hardly characteristic of the period, province or condition. Practice in correct pronunciation of French names might lend a touch of authenticity to the atmosphere: for instance, the “s” in Ghislaine (the General's patient sweetheart) should be mute, as if it were spelled “Gheelen.”