(2 of 5)
Topaze is a graceful and ever so Gallic play about graft in which the characters bear such names as Castel-Benac, Tronche-Bobine and Pitart-Vignolles, and act accordingly. It is the wistful, pathetic, ludicrous history of M. Topaze, a sad-eyed French schoolmaster with a beard, who was ousted from his classroom because he persisted in telling a wealthy parent the truth about her repulsive and boobish child. Not that M. Topaze objected to offering flattery—he was merely too simple ever to have conceived of it. He lived in a world governed by the axioms which he had tried vainly to teach to his small boys. Consequently when he fell in love with the mistress of the politician Castel-Benac, she easily persuaded M. Topaze to become that scoundrel's unconscious tool. And even when M. Topaze learned the truth and spent his days quivering with remorse and fright, and disguising his voice over the telephone, he still kept his position out of his love for the siren.
M. Castel-Benac was an expert in civic corruption. Perhaps his most nefarious enterprise was the erection of a public lavatory just opposite a café. When the proprietor objected to this juxtaposition, M. Castel-Benac charged him a fat sum for haulage, then moved his lavatory down the street and established it opposite another café. But M. Castel-Benac made one tactical mistake. Having determined to rid his office of the gibbering and useless M. Topaze, he procured a farewell gift for that pedagog by gentle blackmail. It was the particular gleam which M. Topaze had long been following—a degree of Doctor of Moral Philosophy. And when he received it, the schoolmaster was transmogrified. A year later he had become a super-politician, beardless, monocled, fastidiously draped, who had gigantically dishonest deals as far as South America, had acquired M. Castel-Benac's office and was about to acquire M. Castel-Benac's dutiful Suzv.
The play was adapted by Benn W. Levy from the French of Marcel Pagnol. It is a preposterous fable about an incredible ass. But its exaggerations are those of a sophisticate who embellishes his careless satires with delicately hilarious details. Frank Morgan as M. Topaze apparently does not mind the fact that his role is basically unbelievable. He makes the figure by turns pitiful and ridiculous and frequently almost real. It is perhaps the most enjoyable of his many fine performances. Phoebe Foster is sleek and chiselled, a decorative element without which the play would not have been properly translated.
The Last Mile is a horrible and sickening play—the most repulsive play now to be seen in Manhattan. There will be a great deal of discussion as to whether it is art or merely nauseous and falsifying realism. But if art includes the clarification of vital experience through order and insight, then this play, which sensitively depicts one of the most terrible predicaments into which life forces its unfortunates, must surely be construed as esthetic.