Hellman's Montserrat

This will be short. Work comes soon. The play itself is short - two acts - and an adaptation. It started in France as written by an Emanuel Robles.

The plot is simple, brutal:

The play occurs in 1812 during Spain's occupation of Venezuela. A Spanish captain, Montserrat, concludes that the occupation is wrong and switches sides to support Simón Bolívar revolution for independence. Monserrate is captured by the Spaniards, and Colonel Izquierdo uses cruel tactics in an effort to compel Montserrat to reveal Bolívar's location. The tactics include taking six strangers from the street and telling them that if they fail to persuade Montserrat to talk the information, they will be killed. In the second half of the play, each of the six strangers pleads his case and is executed.

Nor does it seem all that popular.  Kenneth Tynan does not seem to have liked it (but did like Richard Burton):

...The alarming point is that Miss Hellman sees no need to defend her hero's callous taciturnity. To her mind the end is well worth the means, and her childish assumption that we shall accept Montserrat, without further argument, as a'sympathetic and honourable idealist made my spine prickle with frustrated rage. Montserrat, which was adapted from the French of Emanuel Robles, belongs to the sealed-room type of post-war Parisian drama, to the tradition of Sartre and Camus. Dealing with the responsibilities of the hopelessly trapped, it often becomes so absorbed in its debating points that opportunities for effective and practical action go by the board....

 Nor was Time impressed, The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Nov. 7, 1949.

I thought it much like Watch on the Rhine without an interesting hero - the clash of idealism and power with those without ideology and/or power caught in the middle. 

It is an interesting read. Hellman's dialog remains good. The play does not seem to have been revived but maybe the times have caught up with the play? I wonder if it would be a bad experience to see the play in this era of Putin and the rise of autocrats.

sch