A DOOR MUST BE KEPT OPEN OR SHUT Osborne Studio Gallery, London SW1

The opportunity to see French plays, apart from Molière, Feydeau and Cyrano de Bergerac, is pretty rare in the UK. Alfred de Musset (1810-1857), a French Romantic and dandy, poet and novelist, famous for his traumatic affair with George Sand, also wrote small-scale, sophisticated, intelligent, psychological one-act comedies, which illustrated well-known proverbs. They were extremely popular with professional and amateur actors in 19th century France.
A lonely baron pays a social call on a marquise, a widow, approaching thirty. Fortified by her wit, grace, beauty, money and rank, she affects a fashionable cold indifference to men and their conceited love-making. She doesn’t believe he is really in love with her and thinks that he is just going through the motions, like everybody else, with a litany, full of insincere and patronising compliments, expressed in the most hackneyed of love phrases.
Musset’s comédie-proverbe, translated by Peter Meyer, is a refined and delicate entertainment, a charming trifle, written in a style which recalls the plays of Marivaux and anticipates Jean Anouilh. Director Martin Parr updates the action to 1955 and the civilised badinage, eloquently acted by Christopher Staines and Katherine Heath, lasts just 50 minutes. The venue in a tiny, intimate gallery in Belgravia, seating only 30.