In a league table of British theatre’s most frequent foreign imports, the French fall distantly behind America, Scandinavia, Germany and Russia. Molière and Racine are theoretically admired, but their verse is demanding to translate, while more contemporary dramatists have tended to have sudden runs of fashion. Jean Anouilh (1910-87) was a beneficiary of such a trend in the 1950s and 1960s, but has subsequently been neglected. The Rehearsal, a dark 1950 drama revived at Chichester, has aristocrats and their servants practising for an amateur performance at a weekend retreat of Marivaux’s eighteenth-century comedy of infidelity, La Double Inconstance.In creating a piece about the creation of theatre, in which every actor effectively gets two roles, Anouilh was clearly in