Stage Review : ‘Ladies of Camellias’ Matches Duse, Bernhardt at West End

Faced with a play that is advertised as a comedic confrontation between those two grandes dames of turn-of-the-century theater, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, one expects Lillian Garrett’s “The Ladies of the Camellias” to be your basic knock-down, drag-out cat fight.

Now cat fights can be funny, but the fact remains that they’re usually variations on “Dallas.” The pre-performance image of this play was of actress-managers dueling each other with hairpins. Quaint, but who needs it?

Surprise! That very sense of theater’s quaint irrelevancy is not only addressed in Garrett’s comedy, it’s her main subject. This play is less concerned with two artistic egos than with how they deal with the shock of the new politics of the dawning 20th Century.

The politics comes in the form of an anarchist whose nom de guerre is Ivan (Michael Bell). The burning issue at Le Theatre de la Renaissance had been whether Bernhardt (Victoria Carroll) would put up with Duse doing Dumas’ “Camille” at night (Melinda Peterson), while Madame (Bernhardt) played the matinee. When Ivan takes over the theater at gunpoint, holding both companies hostage until his imprisoned “comrades” are released by the Parisian authorities, the issue shifts to whether either actress will live until curtain time.

Up until Ivan’s appearance, Garrett (who also directed with fleecy mastery) has fashioned a very urbane comedy of manners, but we can’t believe that this is all the play is going to amount to. It is elegantly constructed and observed, including a series of wittily conceived pairings-off between Dumas and Bernhardt, Dumas and Duse (Garr Smith’s Dumas is a good example of a satirical performance avoiding the cartoonish), and Messrs. Worms and Ando, Bernhardt’s and Duse’s perpetually flummoxed leading men (Charles Tachovsky and Marc Tubert, respectively).

When Ivan comments that he’s not surprised that Ando is an actor--”there’s nothing else you could do”--it gibes with everything we’ve witnessed with these truly silly artists. Ando’s greatest concern in life is that his eyes are too close to each other. Worse, everyone confirms it. What’s that next to an anarchist brandishing a pistol?

Very little, Garrett affirms. In what becomes a genuinely Shavian debate between committed patriots to the causes of art and social justice through revolution, Duse and Bernhardt are forced to defend themselves and their life mission against some irrefutable arguments of Ivan’s. It’s something to see France’s greatest thespian rendered speechless when Ivan points out that the money for her costume could feed several starving Parisians for weeks.

Almost nothing gets by Garrett--not the balance of polemical exchange with comic interludes, not the points of view of every character (like Shaw, they all have one), not an ironic resolution that somehow links Ivan with the theater people. Certainly not the actors, absolutely attuned to every nuance and dramatic shift, and impeccably precise in their comic timing.

A few things need work. Gary L. Wissmann’s set is fine as Waiver sets go, but this play needs a sumptuousness that the budget at the West End Playhouse doesn’t permit (Phillip Hayman’s costumes are plenty rich). Peterson settles down into an Italian accent, but in the beginning he sounds Transylvanian. We might accept French characters adopting British accents, but not when they start running down the British (including, in a characteristic literary jab, Shaw, who was a tough theater critic in 1897).

Not that French accents would help: Just try to listen to the Franglais of “80 Days” at the La Jolla Playhouse. But Garrett’s production needs to pay attention to the details. Garrett’s fine play deserves it.