The production has been four years in the making. In 1995, Robert Hossein enlisted two members of the Academie francaise, Alain Decaux and Alain Peyrefitte, to write the script. Decaux is a left-winger, while Peyrefitte was de Gaulle's spokesman for four years and has published a collection of his conversations with the general. "To tell de Gaulle's story, you mustn't love him too much or hate him too much," Hossein says. "The team of Peyrefitte, who loves him too much, and Decaux, who doesn't love him enough, was ideal."
Decaux and Hossein worked together on previous projects and wanted to do a second World War script for the past 10 years. They scrapped two Decaux scenarios about de Gaulle. "I suffered before it clicked, when I thought of the de Gaulle-Churchill confrontation in London," Decaux says. "The show could have been called `De Gaulle-Churchill'. They were two crazy men who, against all the odds, fought Germany."
While Peyrefitte selected appropriate passages from de Gaulle's war memoirs, Decaux sifted through the diaries of Winston Churchill and his private secretary John Colville. Peyrefitte was the play's watchdog, weeding out expressions the general would not have used. "It's not difficult for someone who knew him well and who still has the sound of his voice in his ears," he says.
Only one scene in the two-hour show troubled Peyrefitte - when de Gaulle telephones from Damascus to a naked Churchill soaking onstage in his bathtub. While the men talk, archive film on the giant screen around them shows the Syrian desert littered with thousands of bodies. "There was no telephone between Damascus and London," Hossein admits. "They exchanged telegrams. But a little theatrical licence changes nothing about their argument."
Peyrefitte was more indulgent towards another artistic sleight of hand, when Churchill and de Gaulle make up after a disagreement. "Let's have a drink!" the British prime minister tells the French general. "This exchange shows how they were like an old couple," Peyrefitte says. The two most famous Churchill quips about de Gaulle of course found their way into the play. Five minutes before the Normandy landing, Churchill said the greatest cross he had to bear was the cross of Lorraine. "De Gaulle was a real pain in the ass!" Robert Hossein says almost gleefully. At one point, Churchill was so exasperated by the haughty Frenchman that he ordered him to be taken in chains to Algiers. The British actor Robert Hardy plays Churchill for the fifth time; he portrayed him in the British television series The Wilderness Years. But this is the first time Hardy impersonates Churchill speaking French. Both de Gaulle's son, Admiral Philippe de Gaulle, and Churchill's daughter, Lady Mary Soames, said they wanted the play to be a warts-and-all portrayal of their fathers.
Like millions of French people, the first time Robert Hossein remembers being truly impressed by de Gaulle was during the liberation of Paris. German snipers who had hidden in the medieval roof of Notre Dame Cathedral opened fire during a thanksgiving ceremony. Everyone dived under the pews - except de Gaulle, who calmly remained standing.
Anecdotes are the stuff of de Gaulle legend. The general's private life is more mysterious. Despite his gawky appearance, the man nicknamed "the big asparagus" and "the turkey" at Saint-Cyr military academy seems to have attracted beautiful women. One de Gaulle biographer, Jean Lacouture, hints at the then captain's success with Polish countesses when he was stationed in Warsaw in 1919 and 1920. In 1921, de Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux, the daughter of a Calais industrialist. The couple lived an exemplary bourgeois Catholic existence. But persistent rumours said he had an affair with a French woman in Damascus in 1929. Later, as President of France, de Gaulle did not hide his admiration for Jacqueline Kennedy and Queen Sirikit of Thailand.
With time, it has become permissible to question the darker aspects of the Great Man's character. Following the liberation of Paris, he gave the resistance two days to "settle accounts" rather than clog up the French justice system. Many innocent people were murdered. Recent books by the general's former associates make it clear that he loved France more than the French. By any standards, his remarks were often misanthropist, misogynist and racist, especially towards Africans and Arabs.
The French journalist Georges-Marc Benamou has just completed a book based on interviews with members of the French resistance. The de Gaulle they recall was too preoccupied with his conflict with the Americans to resolve command problems in the maquis. In the words of Andre Dewavrin, alias Col Passy, he was "cold to people, sometimes unbearable". When Passy asked him to be kinder to his men, de Gaulle snapped, "I'm not going to take lessons from a brat like you!" Another Frenchman, Daniel Cordier, arrived in London at the age of 19 to join de Gaulle's Free French. "I'm not going to congratulate you for coming," were the general's first words to him. "You are merely doing your duty."