[In the excerpt below, Thody offers a thematic overview of Becket.]

Perhaps even more than in L'Alouette, Anouilh's aim in Becket is to entertain rather than disturb. Indeed, the ease with which a highly successful commercial film was based upon the play is an indication both of its excellent construction and of its lack of controversial matter. The only surprising feature about the success of Becket is that it should have had to wait for a year before a theatre could be found to accommodate it in Paris. It was, in fact, completed by October 1958, but not produced until a year later, when, like L'Alouette, it enjoyed an extremely enthusiastic reception from the critics and a long run. This success was repeated both in England and America, and it was indeed only in Italy that there was any opposition to Becket: the scene between the Pope and Cardinal Zambelli in Act III ran into trouble with the censorship.

In his programme note, Anouilh openly admitted that his only historical source for the play was Augustin Thierry's Conquête de l'Angleterre par les Normands. Moreover, he added, when he discovered elsewhere that Becket was a Norman and not a Saxon, he had decided to ignore the fact. "For a seriously-minded man", he wrote, "this would have meant the complete collapse of his play. But I am a flippant and easy-going man—and I am writing theatre. I decided that I didn't care. What about you?" The spectator's only reaction can be to approve of Anouilh's decision, since by recognising that the theatre can do without historical accuracy, he concentrated attention on three aspects of Becket's story: his place in the racial conflict between Normans and Saxons, his personal relationship with Henry II, and his final discovery of an authentic ethical value in what the subtitle of the play calls the "Honour of God". The first, in which Anouilh is most indebted to Thierry, provides the least important theme of the play, though the numerous references to conquered and victorious races must have reminded some of Anouilh's audience of another country, in which France was failing to achieve either a racial conquest or a union of two races. If no critic mentioned the Algerian war, this was not because Anouilh's portrait of a conquered people lacked topical relevance. It was because the final union which Becket's death makes possible between Saxon and Norman is so improbably easy a solution to modern racial conflict. By arranging to have the Saxon Becket slain by his knights, Henry Plantagenet is symbolically repeating the conquest of 1066; but by undergoing public penance, he is asking to be forgiven both for the sin of murder and for the brutality of conquest. When this forgiveness is expressed in frenzied cheers from the delighted populace, the play ends with the idea that Becket's martyrdom has had its earthly reward as well. There must have been many who wished that France could solve its racial problems at so little cost.

The two other important themes in the play, Becket's relationship with the King and his own discovery of values, were widely discussed, both for the evidence they provided of Anouilh's theatrical skill and for the light they threw on his development as a thinker. In Anouilh's interpretation, the relationship between Becket and the King represents the simultaneously dangerous and inspiring effect which the injection of culture and self-awareness has upon a vigorous but brutal personality. Because he has known Becket, the King can no longer enjoy life with the unreflecting and uncritical appetite of his Barons. But because he lacks Becket's intelligence, natural good taste, and ability for self-discipline, he can never hope to be like his friend. Henry is one of a long line of histrionic egotists who bellow their way through Anouilh's plays, whereas Becket is more of a novelty: an idealist who is neither hysterical nor neurotic, and who dies for something more than the fear of growing old. His friendship with Henry is the only relationship between two men which Anouilh has so far presented sympathetically, and it is unfortunate that it could so easily be interpreted as homosexual. No critic actually suggested this in print, but there had clearly been enough remarks about the possibility for Georges Portal to go out of his way to reject it in his very favourable review of the play [in Ecrits de Paris, January 1960]. The way in which Daniel Ivernel, playing the King in the Paris production, was constantly pawing and embracing Becket nevertheless did suggest more than a simple man-to-man relationship, and the jealousy which the Queen shows for her husband's affection for Becket has definite sexual overtones. This is the only fault in an otherwise technically perfect play, for it distracts attention from the tragic nature of Henry's love and the moral implications of Becket's final attitude.

Becket is the only character in Anouilh's theatre whose death achieves anything. Antigone merely brings misery to everyone around her, and Jeanne's death is so unlike a genuine martyrdom that Anouilh does not even make it into the crowning moment of his play. Becket's death is not only that of a true martyr, but also, as the King realises, the means whereby England will achieve "its final victory over chaos". Moreover, it is not a death which sacrifices personal values to religious or political ideas:

Becket's last words express his pity for the man who had been his friend and who has ordered his death. In Becket, Anouilh panders to the audience only in the minor characters—the grotesquely English Barons, the impossibly Italian Pope. He takes Becket seriously on a level which he certainly makes historically probable to the layman. He emphasises the religious side of his nature less than did T. S. Eliot [in Murder in the Cathedral], but he does not belittle it. His Becket is a sincere believer, but also a politician, a patriot, and a friend. He is also the only character in the whole of Anouilh's theatre whose behaviour can be meaningfully analysed in existentialist terms.

Until the moment when the King decides to have him made Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket lives entirely on what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic plane. The King recognises this, in the scene in which he takes Gwendoline away from his friend, and Becket himself makes it clear that his scrupulous efficiency in the King's service stems less from devotion to the Crown that from a desire to achieve personal satisfaction by doing the things he has to do well. But he commits neither his emotions nor his loyalty to anything beyond himself. This explains part of the fascination which he exercises on Henry, who is not yet capable of reflective choice, and can admire anyone who is both successful and yet undazzled by success. Nevertheless, as the Archbishop whom Becket subsequently replaces remarks, he is still a man "in search of himself. When he does find himself, he behaves in a manner that recalls Kierkegaard's views in The Stages in Life's Way. As soon as he becomes Archbishop, he turns away from purely aesthetic satisfaction and shows that concern for values which, for Kierkegaard characterises the ethical stage. If he does not go on to that "teleological suspension of the ethical" which Kierkegaard regarded as essential to the truly religious stage, he is perhaps all the more satisfying both as a man and a martyr. When he accepts martyrdom in defence of the rights of the Church, it is because he sees it as incarnating certain moral and political values which are needed here and now and in the world of men. In this, he is a historically acceptable representative of the medieval world, whereas neither Antigone nor Jeanne really leaves the peculiar, distorted and modern world of their creator.

By the time Becket was performed, Anouilh's skill as a dramatist was so taken for granted that its success was attributed by most critics to the new optimism which it expressed rather than to its sound construction and ingenious technique. It is, nevertheless, one of his most accomplished plays, one where the two main characters are equally interesting, and where incident follows incident with variety but without dispersion. Like L'Alouette, it is told in flashback, but also in such a way that, when the opening scene recurs at the end of the play, it is both inevitable and fully explained. The various tricks by which Anouilh constantly reminds his audience that they are in the theatre—the imitation horses, the rapid scene changes—are not as obtrusive as they are in Antigone or L'Alouette. Nevertheless, they still forestall any objection that nature is being inadequately imitated. In Becket, Anouilh observes his aesthetic of the self-conscious theatre, but without parody or mannerism. Like Le Voyageur sans bagage and Pauvre Bitos, Becket is a play where ideas and technique are perfectly balanced. Anouilh either keeps his obsessions out of sight or relates them convincingly to a wider context.