STAGE REVIEW : TASTY ‘JACQUES’ LOSES NOTHING IN TRANSLATION

There is, on the vast stage of the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 3, a churning world in microcosm: human history seen through the eyes of an 18th-Century gnat. But this 18th Century (we are told) is the 18th Century as we imagine it today-- ergo, Anytime. And this gnat is Jacques, a servant, who travels with his Master (Everyman and Everymaster) as they chronicle, for whoever cares to listen in, their loves, lives and assorted other subjects.

Mind you, they are not entirely thrilled by the eavesdropping. At the outset, Jacques notices that there is an audience and is advised by his Master to pretend it isn’t there. Lucky for us. For in the next two hours we are treated to some highly entertaining and well-disguised profundities at the hands of these counterpoised experts: the scruffy what-you-see-is-what-you-get Jacques (Larry Hankin) and his more fragile, snuff-sniffing, powder-wigged Master (David Rasche), a kind if rather abstracted gentleman who can’t conceive of crossing France without his horse.

Friday’s opening of Simon Callow’s vivid and brisk translation of Milan Kundera’s 1981 “Jacques and His Master” marked our auspicious introduction to this relatively unknown (at least to English-speaking audiences) modern classic. An homage (not an adaptation; Kundera is emphatic about this) to Denis Diderot’s novel “Jacques Le Fataliste,” it is right up there with “Waiting for Godot.”

“My master is a good fellow. He obeys me,” says the faithful Jacques late in the play. This comes as no news: The homage is as much to the natural wisdom of fools and embracers of life as it is to Diderot. Kundera himself acknowledges that “Jacques and His Master” is a variation on a theme with connections to Toby Shandy, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the good soldier Schweyk and those fellows who are still waiting for Godot.

By extension, you may also throw in the Harlequin who serves two masters and all of Moliere’s and Shakespeare’s servants.

On this journey to nowhere (“Take me . . . forward,” says Jacques, who explains to his Master that forward is “Everywhere”), we encounter other characters whose identities as friends, foes, lovers and enemies change with the virtuosity of chameleons. So do the very entities they represent.

An innkeeper, for instance, brashly portrayed by the very astute Madge Sinclair, becomes a Marquise bent on the destruction of the Marquis she loves (in a story within a story). One actress (Deborah Thalberg) plays the young Agathe, a noblewoman on whom the Master has his eye, and also plays the harlot triumphantly palmed off on the wretched Marquis as a virtuous bride. There are no absolutes--not in identity, structure or message.

This imprecision is a virtue. The overriding assets of Kundera’s “Jacques” are its light heart and lighter hand. Its humor sparkles unostentatiously. Its interweaving tales of lust and friendship are morally invigorating, yet the bending of truth at their root is more enlightening than truth itself. Curiously, this tasty comedy is a modern morality play.

Callow has directed, with esprit and effervescence, particularly in Act I, which has special brilliance. Things slow down a tad with Acts II and III, especially the former. Callow has chosen to ignore Kundera’s request that the piece be performed without intermission and has inserted two. He would have done better to speed up the middle and bring up the rear, and left it as one piece delivered whole.

The acting by the principals is delicious. Hankin is a deadpan beanpole of a Jacques with a wryness that seems to have permanently sunk into the hollow of his eyes and the five o’clock shadow on his face. Rasche is the perfect complement as his Master: timorous, not too bright, affectionate, generous and perpetually astonished.

In contrast, the vivacious Sinclair offers a polished, assured and witty innkeeper. Sam Anderson, Mark Arnott, Shabaka/Barry Henley, Emily Kuroda, Thalberg and Michael Morrison provide solid support.

More telling than bare (bare is what Kundera requests), Timian Alsaker’s setting looks like the aftermath of some terminal devastation--a battlefield littered with 18th-Century flotsam, through which Jacques and his stumbling Master must carefully pick their way. Todd Jared’s isolating lighting scheme only lends weight to the sense of desolation.

On this relatively empty ground, the scope of Kundera’s “Jacques” can be deceiving. Having undergone a three-way process of distillation--the philosophical perceptions of 18th-Century Diderot, filtered through the consciousness of the 20th-Century exiled Kundera, transformed into unhampered, idiosyncratic English by Callow--it nevertheless preserves its universality intact: human evolution telescoped through the servant/master relationship.

It is an irony that Diderot insisted on absolute realism in his own plays. One suspects he would have strongly approved of the abstraction that Kundera and now Callow have wrought.

Performances at 514 S. Spring St. run Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m., until Aug. 2. Tickets: $10.50-$25; (213) 627-5599.