REVIEW: Léocadia

Broadcast: BBC Home Service – Sunday, 1^st August, 1954 & BBC Home Service – Monday, 25th January, 1965 

Character: Prince Albert Troubiscoi

Léocadia (A.K.A. ‘Time Remembered’) tells the story of a young Prince Albert Troubiscoi (Peter Wyngarde) who had fallen madly in with an opera singer, Léocadia Gardi.

Although the young regent only knew her for three days, when she is accidently strangled by her own scarf following an impassioned discussion about art, the inconsolable Prince on only through his memory of the beautiful young woman.

His doting aunt, the Duchesse d’Andinet d’Andaine (Gladys Young) decides to reconstruct all the places that her nephew and his lady-love had spent those precious three days — employing actors to play all the parts of the people the couple had encountered during those three short days of happiness.

The girl chose by the Duchess to, hopefully lay to rest Léocadia ghost is Amanda (Dorothy Gordon) – a poor milliner from Paris who bears an uncanny resemblance to the singer. She’s asked to seduce the Prince with the hope that she might help heal his broken heart.

To begin with, Albert clings desperately to his memories, but as he slowly begins to fall in love with Amanda, he starts to realise that his melancholy reminiscences of Léocadia are all to do with his concerns about the ephemeral nature of life. Soon the anguish he has been feeling give iway to his new-found feelings for Amanda and, inevitably, the imaginary world created by his aunt, the Duchess, begin to crumble

From The Radio Times:

At last somebody is going to put out and lose Léocadia! After the enormous success here of l’invitation au Château (Ring Round the Moon) one wanted for a production of this even more delicious blend of comedy, fantasy and poetry. Would the Oliviers do it? (They later essayed a far less rewarding piece in rather the same vein). Surely, Peter Brook would see equally dazzling opportunities here, and Oliver Messel be drawn by those scenic directions which call for a Chateau, and the classical park to which an eccentric Duchess has imported the inn, the ice-cream stall and the taxi-cab (now ivy-covered) that remind her nephew of his great love affair? And what a chance for a composer in the musical requirements that are so much part of the piece! Surely some management would score a triumph with this enchanting work?

But no: the first production here has been left to the enterprise of the BBC, which, at least in the drama, is now the strongest bastion this side of the Entante Cordiale. And, incidentally, Léocadia should finally put paid to those who persist in regarding Anouilh as nothing but a sex-obsessed advocate of the death wish (rather as if one were to read only, say, Timone of Athens, and conclude that Shakespeare was a gloomy fellow), for it is compact of humour, and makes fun of those very ideas of life-rejection with which one sometimes hears the author associated. Indeed, the underlying point of Léocadia is surely that life is immensely worth living. There is certainly a bitter, cruel, misanthropic side to Anouilh, but it is purblind to deny that there also runs through his work a strain of thought, of which Léocadia is early evidence and his new play about Joan of Arc the most recent, averring that life must be faced, not shunned. And that is hardly a pessimistic doctrine.

From The Times:

Léocadia was written in 1939, the last of Anouilh’s pièces roses (Shaw-like, he categorises his work as noir, rose, or brilliant. The plot deals with a Prince who mourns a dead opera singer, Léocadia, and spends his time palely loitering in the park where his aunt, the Duchess (Gladys Young), has reconstructed the places linked with the brief romance; now she employs Amanda, a little milliner from Paris, to impersonate the dead diva for three days.

But no brief summary of events can convey the enchanted quality of the play that is wildly funny, and genuinely moving, moon-touched and then mocking, tender, ironical and farcical by turns; in short, a little masterpiece. The Duchess is the grandest of Anouilh’s grandes dames, and there is a charming duffer called Lord Hector (Norman Shelley), a name so much more impressively pronounced French fashion!

A play making such adroit use of all the theatres resources cannot be easily or fully transported to radio, but Raymond Raikes may be trusted to make us feel that we have waited too long for this first production.

The ‘Just Right’ Actor

The decision to broadcast Jean Anouilh’s romantic comedy Léocadia (Third, Sunday and Thursday) set a problem for the producer Raymond Raikes; he had to find an actor who was ‘just right’ to play the important part of the Prince. Since the play had been translated from the French, an actor with a French background was the ideal choice and it was with this thought in mind that, sometime later, Raikes chanced to watch a television production of Liebelei. Impressed by the acting of Peter Wyngarde and thinking that, at any rate, he looked French, Raikes made some inquiries and discovered that the young man was the nephew of Louise Jouvert, the famous French actor.

At the same time, Peter Wyngarde, learning that Léocadia was to be broadcast, telephoned his agent and said, in effect: ‘I must play the part of the Prince; it’s been one of my ambitions for years’. Result: Peter plays the Prince – the first major radio role of an actor who says he learned to act during his years as a P.O.W. in Burma[1]. He was taken prisoner in 1941.

John Hart has composed special music for Leo cardia, including a waltz, road to love, which will be played on a type of zither which has never before been erred on the air in this country.

Notes: [1]. Peter was actually imprisoned in China.

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