It is hard to say which is worse, the play or the production. The production is unlikely to be with us long, after the appalling reviews it has already received (see, for example, the comprehensive demolition jobs by Michael Billington in The Guardian and Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph). More important, in the long term, is the damage this will do to the reputation both of Anouilh and Becket, one of his best-known plays.
      The critics have dismissed the play out of hand, as a tired old costume drama, which tells the story of Becket's friendship with King Henry II, which ends in conflict and his brutal murder at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. There is a lot wrong with the play: it is slow, historically inaccurate (Becket, a Norman, is presented as a Saxon) and psychologically crude. As an account of the clash between Church and State, it is strangely tedious, a poor man's A Man For All Seasons, which appeared at almost exactly the same time (1960).
      The language has neither beauty nor poetry and is not helped by the translation by Frederic and Stephen Raphael. Peter Brook, an important champion of Anouilh here in the Fifties, once wrote, 'To translate Anouilh is no matter of matching chat with chat: it demands re-creation, a re-shaping of ideas into phrases that have an English elegance and grace.' The Raphaels have tried to give Anouilh a tough vitality ('God's having a laugh', 'His Royal Highnarse, Henry the Turd'), but it's hardly 'elegance and grace'. It just adds to the sense of a dead museum-piece, with no relevance or topicality today.
      If director John Caird had an idea about how to give this play a new life there is no evidence of it here. His production manages to be both too slow and too fast. It's not fast enough, and needs to lose at least twenty minutes, with endless bitty scenes of no interest. At the same time, the actors rattle off their lines and rarely stop to look at each other to give the dialogue any significance or impact. There are moments of great cruelty and violence in the play, yet their impact just flies past, because none of the actors will pause the action and just look at each other to register what has happened.
      Caird has one central problem. Becket is a famous two-hander and has always attracted top stars. The 1960-61 award-winning Broadway production starred Olivier (as Becket) and Anthony Quinn (as Henry). At the RSC in 1961 the parts were played by Eric Porter and Christopher Plummer. The film (1964), starred Burton and Peter O'Toole and when the play was last performed in the West End, in 1991-92, the parts were played by Derek Jacobi and Robert Lindsay.
      Caird's production has no big names which are remotely comparable. Jasper Britton makes a brave fist of playing the tortured, almost hysterical Henry. Dougray Scott, however, shows what happens when you give a big stage part to an actor whose reputation is based on TV and film work. He is wooden throughout, unable to speak the Raphaels' thin lines or show any emotion. To call Scott's performance pedestrian would be too kind. What he is doing playing such a large part in a major new West End production is unimaginable. Why the producers set out with this revival without two bigger names is just as impossible to fathom.
The worst piece of miscasting, after Scott, is Henry's wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, a fiery, formidable queen, one of the great figures of the Middle Ages. Anouilh does little with the part, but Polly Kemp does still less, and seems a pale blonde waif of a thing. Michael Fitzgerald has received some flack for his marvellously camp performance as the French King, but at least he has tried to make something of his part and gives the audience a sense of some of the issues that might be at stake in Anouilh's play. That's more than can be said on anyone else apart from Jasper Britton. 
      It is sad to think what this production will do to Anouilh's reputation. It is some time since his post-war heyday, and it is hard to recall that at one time he was one of the major figures in the golden age of modern French theatre. In the twenty years beteween the first production of Antigone in nazi-occupied Paris and the film of Becket, which received twelve Oscar nominations, Anouilh's plays attracted the biggest names in British theatre: emerging young directors like Hall and Brook, and major actors like Vivien Leigh, Paul Scofield and Olivier. 
      Perhaps the key fact about Anouilh is that he was one of that extraordinary generation of French writers born on the eve of the First World War, who came of age in the 1930s and lived through the Nazi occupation and experience of Vichy. Anouilh was born in 1910, the same year as Jean-Louis Barrault and Genet, a little younger than Sartre and de Beauvoir, and two or three years older than Ionesco, Camus and Marguerite Duras. This was the generation that dominated French drama and literature in the 1940s and '50s. Anouilh's Antigone was first performed in 1944, year after Camus wrote, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, the same year as Sartre wrote, Huis-Clos, and the year before Barrault starred in les Enfants du Paradis. In 1952 he wrote, The Waltz of the Toreadors, the same year that Ionesco wrote, The Chairs. In 1953, he wrote The Lark, about Joan of Arc, the year Beckett wrote, Waiting for Godot. When Anouilh wrote Becket in 1959, it was the year Barrault took over the Odéon-Théâtre de France, Roger Blin directed Genet's Les Nègres and Duras wrote her greatest screenplay, Hiroshima Mon Amour.
      We should hesitate, then, before writing off Anouilh on the basis of this production. He is a major name in mid-20th century theatre, part of an extraordinary moment in French cultural life. These dates are not incidental to Becket. The theme of occupation, so clumsily handled by director and cast alike, is crucial to the play. Anouilh's play is about the conflict between Norman occupiers and Saxon occupied. Billington and others have assumed Anouilh was just plain ignorant when he made Becket a Saxon, when he was in fact a Norman. Anouilh, however, was quite happy to bend history to serve his dramatic needs. He wanted to explore the dilemmas of occupation: do you collaborate or fight? Is resistance simply one thing, or can it take many forms? These were not trivial questions for Anouilh or his contemporaries who lived through the Vichy years. 
      Arguably, Becket should be seen as part of an extraordinary trilogy, together with Antigone (1944) and The Lark (1953). All three plays are set against the background of war or civil war. More important, they are about the choices that such historical traumas raise. In the face of occupation whether by the Normans as in Becket or by the English as in The Lark or in the aftermath of bitter conflict (as in Antigone) what do you do? How do you respond? Anouilh's characters take two paths. First, there is idealism or honour, you don't make any concession to power but do what is right. This is the path taken by Antigone, Joan of Arc and Becket. In each case, it is the path of honour but leads to death. Alternatively, there is the path of compromise and pragmatism, do what works, whether it is right or not. This is the choice of Creon (in Antigone), of the Bishop of London (in Becket) and of other French characters in The Lark. In each case, the compromiser distrusts, even hates the idealist. Behind Becket is the shadow of Vichy. It is the deep background to the play.
      What is distinctive about Becket, is the relationship between the two men. It starts as friendship  lost of macho roistering about women, drink and sport. Then it becomes conflict  between Church and State, God and law  overlaid with homo-eroticism. Henry misses Becket's friendship. More than this, he misses his love. Married to the cold Eleanor of Aquitaine, driven crazy by his demanding mother, he yearns for Becket's companionship, and it is no coincidence that the moments of cruelty and conflict in the play follow scenes between Henry, his mother and his wife.
      The problem is that neither the language nor the drama bring these conflicts to life. There is much talk of occupation and of Becket's Saxon background, and you could hardly miss the Freudian homo-erotic themes, but neither live in the play. What emerges instead is a troubling absence. Other characters talk of Becket as a mystery, as an enigma. No one understands why he changes from the king's drinking partner and sidekick to an austere man of principle, unbending, refusing to compromise. This should be mysterious and troubling, raising deep questions about motivation and the moral dilemmas of how we deal with occupation and historical tragedy. Instead, because of a much flawed production, it is just uninteresting. At the end of this terrible Becket, it is worth asking what kind of production could bring these important, always timely issues to life?
David Herman