Man of No Destiny

Michel de Ghelderode, the Belgian playwright who died in 1962, had a studied aversion to the 20th century. For a long time, the century reciprocated. A recluse racked by asthma, Ghelderode once described himself as a "no-making-money author." Although he began writing plays in 1918, he had little success in Europe until the 1940s, and U.S. productions have been scanty and unsuccessful. Now Pantagleize, a play Ghelderode wrote in 1929, is seeing Broadway for the first time in a bold, resourceful production that is the opening repertory offering of the APA-Phoenix's current Manhattan season. Ghelderode may at last begin to strike roots in the same theatrical and intellectual soil that has proved hospitable to Beckett, lonesco and Genet.

Pantagleize is a fool in Christ, one of nature's eternal innocents. Played with gently preoccupied detachment by Ellis Rabb, an elongated matchstick of a man, Pantagleize casually scratches himself against the world and sets it flaming. It all happens quite inadvertently. He wakes up on his 40th birthday and wonders what his destiny is, or if his destiny is to have no destiny. "What a lovely day," he says, and his destiny begins. The words turn out to be the secret code for starting a revolution.

Antithesis of Brecht. In this "farce to make you sad," Ghelderode systematically and satirically derides all the causists who ever hoped to remold the world. There is Pantagleize's Negro servant Bamboola, a naive firebrand who believes that overnight "the Negroes will be made white." There is Blank, a poet who dabbles in politics and diddles in literature. There is Innocenti, a lawyer passing as a waiter and living out the logical absurdity of a politically engaged nihilist. Pantagleize is oblivious to all except Rachel Silberchatz, a Jewish girl as splinteringly comic in her undeviating revolutionary fanaticism as Pantagleize is in his clownish wooing.

These burlesque-house Lenins get their hour in court before a puppet-like tribunal of military robots--and they get their moment before a firing squad No one in the play escapes Ghelderode's derisory censure except Pantagleize, whom he sees as a questing saint, "bound to Parsifal by purity, and to Don Quixote by courage and holy madness. And if he dies, it is because particularly in our time the Innocents must be slaughtered: that has been the law since the time of Jesus."

In dramatic terms, Ghelderode is the antithesis of Brecht. Ghelderode trusted in instinct; Brecht worshiped intellect. Brecht called for a didactic theater of ideology; Ghelderode scorned ideologies and celebrated the theater of magic, spectacle and mystery. He saw all men divided and torn on a Manichaean battleground of darkness and light, flesh and spirit, and he never lost his conviction that they danced at the end of fate's string. If his plays are sometimes episodic and full of antic despair, they also display the probing gallantry of quests. Ghelderode could say with his hero in Christophe Colomb: "Farewell, America, you were too easy to discover," and then go on voyaging to hidden continents of the human psyche.

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