Jean Anouilh

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Anouilh was born on the 23rd of June 1910 in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux. His father pressed fabric and thread into shape for a living; his mother, Marie-Magdeleine, played violin in a casino orchestra by the sea. From backstage at a music hall in the nearby resort of Arcachon, a small boy stayed up past bedtime reading scripts borrowed from the resident authors. He wrote his first play at 12. None of those early pages survive.

  What did survive was a career spanning five decades, a body of work that filled stages from Paris to New York, and one play in particular that managed the near-impossible: it was performed under Nazi-occupied France without a single cut from the censors, and yet the audience understood it as resistance. How does a playwright thread that needle? And what kind of man refuses to explain himself even afterward, writing in a letter that his life is his personal business and he intends to keep it that way?

• 2. Craft Before Commerce

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  At 25, Anouilh took a job as secretary to the actor and director Louis Jouvet at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées. Jouvet had no particular interest in encouraging his young assistant's writing ambitions. The job had one useful side effect, though: Jouvet had lent Anouilh furniture left over from a production of Jean Giraudoux's play Siegfried to furnish his modest apartment, and Giraudoux himself became a real inspiration.

  Before his theatrical debut, Anouilh had spent time as a copywriter at the advertising agency Publicité Damour, and he spoke more than once with wry approval of the lessons in brevity and precision he learned there. His father the tailor had given him, in his own telling, a pride in conscientious craftsmanship. The two educations-advertising discipline and tailoring pride-set the tone for plays that critics described as having clearly organized plot and eloquent dialogue.

  His debut, Humulus le muet, was a collaboration with Jean Aurenche. His first solo works, L'Hermine in 1932 and Mandarine in 1933, were staged by Aurélien Lugné-Poe at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. Lugné-Poe worked by the philosophy that "the word creates the decor," keeping his sets to simple lines and color so that Anouilh's language could carry the full weight. Both plays closed quickly, after 37 and 13 performances respectively, but Anouilh kept writing. His first major success did not arrive until 1937, with Le voyageur sans bagage directed by the experimental Russian director Georges Pitoëff at the Théâtre des Mathurins on the 16th of February.

• 3. Black Plays and Pink Plays

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  Anouilh organized his own work into categories that he felt reflected the phases of his evolution as a writer. The pièces noires, or black plays, were tragedies and realistic dramas. Their protagonists tended to be young, idealistic, and uncompromising, and the only way such characters could maintain their integrity in Anouilh's world was often by choosing death. Antigone was the most famous of these, alongside Jézabel and La Sauvage.

  Set against them were the pièces roses, the pink plays, where fantasy dominated and the mood resembled a fairy tale. Le Bal des voleurs, Le Rendez-vous de Senlis, and Léocadia belong to this group. Here the concern shifts: instead of characters choosing death over compromise, protagonists struggle under the burden of their past, searching for a freer existence.

  The distinction mattered to Anouilh. He published his collected works in volumes arranged by tone, not by date, because he believed tone was the more revealing organizing principle. David I. Grossvogel traced this tension back to Le Voyageur sans bagage, where a World War I veteran with amnesia cannot reconcile the man he once was-a man who slept with his brother's wife and badly injured his best friend-with the near-angelic person he has become. The veteran befriends a young English boy, shows him an identifying scar, and allows the boy to claim him as family. Scholar Marvin Carlson called this play the beginning of Anouilh's search to justify the unhappiness of his youth.

• 4. Antigone Under Occupation

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  On the 4th of February 1944, at the Théâtre de l'Atelier with Monelle Valentin in the title role, Antigone opened in German-occupied Paris. The Vichy censors passed it without objection. That permission turned out to be precisely the problem, and precisely the point.

  French theatre-goers read the play as a contemporary political parable about the French Resistance. Antigone's unyielding defiance mapped onto those who refused to collaborate; Creon's argument for political expediency mapped onto those who did. But the Vichy regime had not objected, which meant the play also offered a reading that was sympathetic to collaboration: Creon's position is argued convincingly, and Anouilh, like Sophocles before him, does not let the pragmatist be simply wrong.

  This ambiguity was not an accident. Anouilh spent most of his life refusing political labels. He had worked in Paris throughout the occupation and was later accused by some critics of potential Nazi sympathism because he refused to take sides during France's collaboration with the Axis. The controversy sharpened in the mid-1940s when he joined a group of intellectuals who signed a petition for clemency on behalf of the writer Robert Brasillach, condemned to death for being a Nazi collaborator. Brasillach was executed by firing squad in February 1945. Anouilh's position was not that Brasillach was innocent, but that the new government had no right to prosecute individuals for what he called "intellectual crimes" in the absence of concrete military or political action. He never elaborated further in public.

• 5. Brilliant and Grating

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  By the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the idealistic young protagonists of Anouilh's earlier plays had aged into something harder. His characters became middle-aged, and the tone became darker and more openly cruel. He divided these works into two groups.

  The pièces brillantes, or brilliant plays, kept aristocratic settings and witty wordplay. L'Invitation au château, translated for London audiences as Ring Round the Moon and directed there by Peter Brook, belongs here, along with Colombe. The pièces grinçantes, or grating plays, traded wit for disillusionment. La Valse des toréadors and Le Réactionnaire amoureux are bitterly funny in a way that the earlier pink plays never were.

  His costume plays, the pièces costumées, took on historical subjects. Becket depicted the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket defending the church against Henry II of England, the monarch who had appointed him to his see and who was also his friend. Becket became an international success. L'Alouette, his Joan of Arc story, matched the commercial reach of Antigone and was staged at the Longacre Theatre in New York on the 17th of November 1955 with Julie Harris in the lead role.

  Becket reached the stage in Paris on the 1st of October 1959, directed by Anouilh himself, and was later adapted for film with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton, with a screenplay by Edward Anhalt, produced by Hal Wallis Productions in 1964.

• 6. The Playwright Watching Himself

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  La Grotte, opening at the Théâtre Montparnasse-Gaston Baty on the 6th of October 1961, marked a shift in what Anouilh was willing to put on stage about his own situation as a writer. The central character is a playwright suffering from writer's block who finds himself recalling the characters of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author with some frustration.

  Metatheatricality, meaning commentary on the business of theatre within the world of the play itself, had always been present in Anouilh's work. But in the final period it moved to the center. His late plays increasingly featured characters who were themselves playwrights or theatre directors. Scholars have proposed calling these works pièces secrètes, secret dramas, based on a declaration from Antoine, the playwright-protagonist of Cher Antoine; ou, L'Amour raté, that the world must take notice of these intimate forms.

  Anouilh pushed back against the solemn readings that critics had attached to his work across decades. He pointed to Molière as the model for what French theatre could do: laugh at misfortune, rather than wallow in it. "The true French theatre is the only one that is not gloomy," he said, "in which we laugh like men at war with our misery and our horror."

  In the 1950s he had begun losing audiences to the absurdist theatre of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Though he shared, critics noted, a similar desperate vision of human existence with those writers, his semi-realistic plays came to seem old-fashioned by comparison. In the 1980s he reinvented himself again, now as a director, staging both his own plays and works by other authors. He died of a heart attack in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the 3rd of October 1987, survived by his second wife, Nicole Lançon, and four children. In 1980, seven years before his death, he had become the first recipient of the Grand Prix du Théâtre de l'Académie française, an award established that year.