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“I’ve been exploring this part, and the time in which the play was written,” she said, referring to Jean Giraudoux’s “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” the musical’s inspiration.

As he converses — and, implicitly, identifies with — the confined creature in the bowl, he seems to belong to the species of charming lunatics who populate the whimsical works of French dramatists like Anouilh and Giraudoux.

First produced in 1945, the year after Giraudoux’s death, “Madwoman” contains lines and themes that feel eerily timely today.

Or did even worse happen after one had manhandled the other during a performance of Giraudoux’s “Judith”?

Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian "There was a time when garbage was a pleasure," they sing in this musical version of Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, which flopped on Broadway in 1969.