SOURCE: Clurman, Harold. “Theatre.” Nation, New York, N.Y. (8 October 1973): 349.

In the following review, Clurman gives a mixed assessment of the 1973 New York production of The Waltz of the Toreadors, deeming the drama “the play which reveals most of Anouilh's essential traits in perfect balance.”

The Waltz of the Toreadors, produced in Paris in 1952 and a failure then, perhaps because it was not sufficiently cut and also because the author himself directed it, has since been successfully done in London and New York. It is, in my view, the play which reveals most of Anouilh's essential traits in perfect balance.

Anouilh is a romantic idealist whose idealism plagues him. He yearns for purity, nobility, moral courage, glory, but discerns little but pettiness, chicanery, deception and vice. Life riles him because it isn't consistent; he abhors the bulk of humanity because it professes virtues it doesn't practice. There is...