Sur la Route de Madison

 It was bound to be a hit. Who can resist a famous, best-selling romance novel coming alive -- and with a legendary star of screen (and more recently, stage)? Certainly not the French audiences from whom come audible sighs when Alain Delon enters Madison County, Iowa's most famous farmhouse. You can't blame them for being anxious. First, they had to sit through a bit of an overture while staring at the huge painted curtain. With its picture centered by a weathered, red wooden, covered bridge over a sun-lit stream surrounded by flat country, it not only sets the locale but serves as a divider between scenes to follow.
The play opens on the darkened interior of a farmhouse kitchen. At a small desk sits a woman with pulled back gray hair and serviceable bulky dress to match. Francesca Johnson, widowed, living there alone, unwraps a box of objects sent her by Robert Kincaid's estate. To her they are memories objectified. She gives voice to the beginnings of these. Years seem to fall away as does that curtain. Then it rises on a flashback to her sunny, symmetrically laid out kitchen decades earlier. Her husband Richard was away for four days at a fair with their children. Robert Kincaid, a photographer looking for the Pont Roseman, knocked on her door and came into her life. And her love.

Each day and night marks a stage in Robert and Francesca's romance. The most daring presents their first passionate encounter. As their dance after dinner leads to an embrace and kiss, her filmy dress falls about her ankles. You hear the audience relax as the curtain falls. There's no need for a bedroom scene. The magic seems to carry through to the culmination of the lovers' days together. Robert never returns, but it's clear that he never leaves Francesca's heart. Nor she his. You feel somehow they'll be together in some afterlife.
In the depiction of Richard Johnson's return there's not so much an emotional let-down as a calming of the atmosphere. Not unattractive himself, Benoist Brione seems to sense something different in his home. Happily, the way he resumes everyday life and shows affection for Francesca gives her means to a transition that may be sad but isn't tragic. The poetic conclusion that "it's better to have loved and lost" surely applies.
Alain Delon's star turn as Robert is probably the major audience attraction. He doesn't disappoint.

Comparisons with the film version of the novel are inevitable. The audience in Paris seems to love Delon as much as Clint Eastwood. Certainly Delon's electric as Kinkaid. He's gray, heavier (though more muscular than fat), with a deeper voice. He generously gives Mireille Darc star position during the play and many curtain calls. She deserves praise for her sustained emotion, though she doesn't quite come off as a housewife who often goes barefoot. She's more the pretty actress who once had a real-life relationship with Delon. And you hear people comparing her to Meryl Streep, who's just incomparable. Still, Darc and Delon exude the kind of glamour that many want to see as much as the play.

It will be surprising if someone -- maybe novelist Waller himself -- doesn't try converting "The Bridges of Madison County" into an English-language play like this French adaptation. Perhaps co-producer Delon could cross over to the U.S. stage playing Kincaid as a photographer... for "Paris Match."