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Tiger at the Gates (translated from the French of Jean Giraudoux by Christopher Fry) brought early distinction to the 1955-56 season. Just how good an orthodox play is this sunburst of dialectics and wit may be open to question; beyond question the play exhibits the elegance, the light-fingered thoughtfulness, the ironic lyricism of the most civilized playwright of the era between the wars. And Christopher Fry's translation not only does brilliantly by the play but may even be Fry's solidest writing for the theater.
The play's French title is The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, and it is Trojan Hector's fierce and fruitless effort to make good this claim that constitutes Giraudoux's action. Troy's greatest warrior, Hector (well played by Michael Redgrave), comes home to find his brother Paris home ahead of him, with Helen. Hector is determined to return Helen to Menelaus, King of Sparta, and so avoid war; nor is the assured, shallow, minxlike Helen (amusingly played by Diane Cilento) the obstacle. The real obstacles are Troy's idealists, who particularly idealize war; its elderly poets, who love celebrating young men's deaths; its common people, who are spoiling for a fight; its international lawyers, for whom a legalistic victory is well worth an international cataclysm. Finding Troy useless, Hector turns to Greece, to the worldly-wise Ulysses (played impeccably by Walter Fitzgerald). Though thinking wars unpreventable, Ulysses vows this time to prevent one. But a warmongering poet whom Hector angrily throttles cries out that Greek Ajax has throttled him; Ajax is mauled by Trojans; and Giraudoux's story passes over into Homer's.
Though it ultimately achieves a kind of wry grandeur, the play does so on its own ironic rather than on any customary dramatic turns. Tiger displays a charming loquacity, a dawdling relentlessness. Helen must chatter and Hecuba sniff, and there are little vaudevilles on the difficulty of cursing well, little broadsides on a bard's-eye view of war. If in some sense a protest against war, the play is much more a lament for war's seeming inevitability. Like all masters of humane irony, all practitioners of philosophic high comedy, Giraudoux pierces to a tragic fundamental, to a world never long enough governed by logic, or spurred on by truth, or saved by virtue. His own dazzling speeches, moreover, ram home how inflammatory or mendacious words can be.
As between such differing masters of dialectics and irony, there is something poignant and lyrical (because more pessimistic) in Giraudoux that is not found in Shaw. Yet here the two men touch, for Shaw wrote a kind of Tiger at the Gates in Caesar and Cleopatra. Each man saw worlds about to overturn through a queen's lure; in Shaw's Caesar as in Giraudoux's Hector, the great warrior is the great hater of war; in Shaw's Caesar as in Giraudoux's Ulysses, the wise man sadly grasps the impotence of wisdom. And both plays are as autumnal in their ruefulness as they remain vernal in their wit.