The venerable grande dame of the French stage, Madeleine Renaud, eighty-seven, seemed to make her performance more exciting each evening last winter as Winnie in Oh! Les Beaux Jours (-Happy days), Samuel Beckett's celebrated play. Buried to her neck in a sand dune - a concrete symbol for being mired in the human condition - Renaud performs as a virtual one-woman show. She monologues a talkative, sentimental old woman - building from an almost Pollyanna-like gaiety to a powerful dramatic climax.
Renaud has conceived for her character a complete back story in order to play her character of Winnie. "It was and always will be my greatest role," she says. This sense of what Winnie's early life must have been enables her to infuse Beckett's spare text with a remarkable density, making the play more accessible, perhaps, than any other work of his. Renaud, who created the part twenty-five-years ago in the original production directed by the late Roger Blin (and in which Jean-Louis Barrault played the bit part of Winnie's husband), today draws a full house whenever the play turns up in the repertory of the Renaud-Barrault. Their theater, a beehive of theatrical activity, is located in the old remodeled skating rink at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysees.
Burst of Revolutionary Fervor
Through the decades, Renaud and her husband Jean-Louis Barrault have been acting in and directing their own company in one major theater or another in Paris. In the immediate postwar years they were quartered in the prestigious Theatre Marigny, nest door to the Elysees Palace. In the sixties, they moved over to the Left Bank to the Theatre l'Odeon, a national theater, the Theatre de France - a decision of the famous Minister of Culture Andre Malraux. But at the time of France's mini-revolution of May 1968, Renaud and Barrault got caught up in the burst of revolutionary fervor that swept the city for a week.
The theatre de l'Odeon was "occupied" by hot-eyed students and Left Bank drifters who held round-the-clock "dialogues" about life and revolution. Rashly the Renaud-Barrault couple threw their lot in with rebels. Minister Malraux reacted, predictably enough, by expelling them from the government funded theater.
Although the couple quite rapidly found another theater for themselves - the halls of the huge Quai d'Orsay railway station (converted this year into a museum) - they discovered that the lovable revolutionaries they had welcomed with open arms had, during their brief stay, managed to destroy a large number of the company's costumes and scenery.
A few years later, as plans to turn the railway station into a museum evolved, Renaud, then in her seventies, and Barrault, ten years younger, started looking for another theater. Eventually they obtained a lease on their present quarters at Rond-Point running to the year 2000. (Renaud says she doesn't have to worry about being unemployed for the next thirteen years anyway.)
At the Rond-Point they produce almost weekly miracles of good theater. Revivals such as Oh! Les Beaux Jours alternate with original creations. One current production is Pour un Oui, Pour un Non, a flawless work by nouveau romancier Natalie Sarraute, which deftly demonstrates that offhand phrases, tiny inflections -
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