Mademoiselle Colombe
Review.
Reviewer: Alexa Baracaia
Precious little actually happens in Jean Anouilh's vivacious 1951 comedy, but somehow, somewhere around the middle of the second half, you realise that this deliciously camped-up, silly confection of a play has telescoped into a heartfelt polemic on the inevitable inconstancy and perpetual disappointment of love, lief and everything else besides.
It is the habitual gloomy Anouilh eye-view of the world seen through pantomime spectacles and set in the debauched world of Parisian theatre circa 1900. Colombe is an insipid, wan creature, married to prim, pedantic Julien, and on the cusp of a rude awakening at the hands of her husband's debauched grande dame of an actress mother, Madame Alexandra.
As London Stage Company's debut production, it bodes fairly well. Sophie Bold's vapid Colombe blooms almost imperceptibly into a strong-willed woman adept in the application of her feminine 'devices'.
As the fantastically appalling Mme Alexandra, Honor Blackman raises her gravelly tones a pitch and sweeps from scene to scene with grandiloquent gusto.
Jeremy Sams' new translation brims with frivolity and delightful smut and, striking a queer balance between the archly archaic and the colloquial, has a fresh immediacy. But it also lays a trap for the cast to fall into sloppy Stateside slang. As a result the men of the piece, flitting like painted moths around Colombe, lack the requisite rakish panache - bar Donald Pickering's incorrigible Du Bartas.
Dripping with affectation, the players are as effete as their faux Louis XV garb and David W Kidd's spotlit punctuation of each scene heightens the self-conscious staginess. Yet what begins as a vision of vacuity finds its way, through Colombe's transformation, into a [sic] eloquent treatise on the fundamental theatricality of reality itself.
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