The Portrait Of A Lady

Vivien Leigh & The Stage

Peter Wyngarde (Count Marcellus) and Vivien Leigh (Paola)

 

The Cast: Vivien Leigh as Paola; Claire Bloom as Lucile; Peter Wyngarde as Count Marcellus; Derek Nimmo as Joseph; Fiona Duncan as Gilly; Basil Hoskins as Armand; Pauline Jameson as Eugenie; Freda Jackson as Barbette; Robin Bailey as Mr. Justice Blanchard; Lawrence Davidson as Clerk of the Court.

Claire Bloom was later replaced by Ann Todd.

Paola (Vivien Leigh) and Lucile (Claire Bloom)

Christopher Fry's Duel Of Angels - translated from Jean Giraudoux's Pour Lucr�ce - juggled vice and virtue until it was difficult to tell one from the other, or to say whether purity or evil does the most harm.

Set in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1868, it was a chilling play suggested by the legend of Lucr�ce, the Roman lady who preferred death to dishonour - not her own death, but that of the man she believed had raped her.

Count Marcellus (Peter Wyngarde) and Lucile (Claire Bloom)

Neither comedy nor tragedy, but in a dramatic category all of its own, it confronted pitiless purity in the form of Lucile, a priggish magistrate's wife, and proud promiscuity in the person of Paola, an adulteress whose husband knows nothing and worships her.

Lucile cannot and will not conceal her recognition of "vice" in others, whilst Paola cannot suffer the disclosure of her infidelities. She must therefore take revenge by humbling her adversary. To this end she drugs Lucile and has her taken to the bedroom of the handsome Count Marcellus. Believing that the Count has raped her, Lucile orders her husband to restore her honour by challenging Marcellus to a duel.

The resulting confrontation leaves Marcellus dead and her husband a fugitive, but for Lucile this is not quite the worst. In the final scene, finding immorality all around her, she takes poison in order to claim her final victory of virtue over deceit and degradation.

Vivien Leigh was offered the role of Paola. Like her first great success, The Mask Of Virtue, it was about deceit and destroying people in order to gratify others. Vivien was the beautiful, heartless, capricious and promiscuous wife of a well-off French provincial bourgeois. She takes revenge on the community's model wife, an angel of rectitude played by Claire Bloom, by making her believe she has slept with a libertine while drugged. Jean-Louis Barrault was brought from Paris to direct.

Barrault was surprised by the fierce passion Vivien brought to the part. Sharpness, he'd expected; but this was a "panther". It was not surprising that in her present mood she should have excelled in the story of one woman's revenge on another. When the play opened in April 1958, the notices were some of the best she ever received.

Olivier at this time was in America reprising his role in The Entertainer on stage and on film. He had begun an affair with Joan Plowright, his co-star.

2003 � Vivien Leigh & The Stage.

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