Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist and screenwriter whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 production of Sophocles' Antigone, which, though performed without objection by censors, was nevertheless seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. His plays are less experimental than those of his contemporaries, having clearly organized plot and eloquent dialogue. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromise.
Life and career
Early life
Anouilh was born in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux, France, and had Basque ancestry. His father, François Anouilh, was a tailor, and Anouilh maintained that he inherited from him a pride in conscientious craftmanship. He may owe his artistic bent to his mother, Marie-Magdeleine, a violinist who supplemented the family's meager income by playing summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon. Marie-Magdeleine worked the night shifts in the music-hall orchestras and sometimes accompanied stage presentations, affording Anouilh ample opportunity to absorb the dramatic performances from backstage. He often attended rehearsals and solicited the resident authors to let him read scripts until bedtime. He first tried his hand at playwriting here at the age of 12, though his earliest works do not survive.Image:lycée chaptal.jpeg|thumb|250px|left|The Lycée Chaptal, at the corner of rue de Rome and the boulevard des Batignolles
In 1918 the family moved to Paris where the young Anouilh received his secondary education at the Lycée Chaptal. Jean-Louis Barrault, later a major French director, was a pupil there at the same time and recalls Anouilh as an intense, rather dandified figure who hardly noticed a boy some two years younger than himself. He earned acceptance into the law school at the Sorbonne, but, unable to support himself financially, he left after just 18 months to seek work as a copywriter at the advertising agency Publicité Damour. He liked the work and spoke more than once with wry approval of the lessons in the classical virtues of brevity and precision of language he learned while he drafted advertising copy.
Anouilh's financial troubles continued after he was called up to military service in 1929. Supported by only his meager conscription salary, Anouilh married the actress Monelle Valentin in 1931. Though Valentin starred in many of his plays, Anouilh's daughter Caroline, says the marriage was not a happy one. Anouilh's youngest daughter Colombe even says there was never an official marriage between Anouilh and Valentin. She allegedly had multiple extramarital affairs, which caused Anouilh much pain and suffering. The infidelity weighed heavily on the dramatist as a result of the uncertainty about his own parentage. According to Caroline, Anouilh had learned that his mother had had a lover at the theatre in Arcachon who was actually his biological father. In spite of this, Anouilh and Valentin had a daughter, Catherine, in 1934 who followed the pair into theatre work at an early age. Anouilh's growing family placed further strain on his already limited finances. Determined to break into writing full time, he began to write comic scenes for the cinema to supplement their income.
Theatre work
At the age of 25 Anouilh found work as a secretary to the French actor and director Louis Jouvet at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées. Though Anouilh's boss had happily lent him some of the set furniture left over from the production of Jean Giraudoux's play Siegfried to furnish his modest home, the director was not interested in encouraging his assistant's attempts at playwriting. Jouvet had risen to fame in the early 1930s through his collaborations with the playwright Giraudoux, and together the two worked to shift focus from the authorial voice of the director back to the playwright and his text.Giraudoux was an inspiration to Anouilh, and with the encouragement of the acclaimed playwright he began writing again in 1929. Before the end of the year he made his theatrical debut with Humulus le muet, a collaborative project with Jean Aurenche. It was followed by his first solo projects, L'Hermine in 1932 and Mandarine in 1933, both produced by Aurélien Lugné-Poe, an innovative actor and stage manager who was then head of the Théâtre de l'Œuvre. Ruled by the philosophy, "the word creates the decor," Lugné-Poe let Anouilh's lyrical prose shine in front of a backdrop of simple compositions of line and color that created a unity of style and mood.
The plays were not great successes, closing after 37 and 13 performances, respectively, but Anouilh persevered, following up with a string of productions, most notably Y'avait un prisonnier. These works, most in collaboration with the experimental Russian director Georges Pitoëff, were considered promising despite their lack of commercial profits, and the duo continued to work together until they had their first major success in 1937 with Le voyageur sans bagage. In subsequent years there was rarely a season in Paris that did not prominently feature a new Anouilh play, and many of these were also being exported to England and America. After 1938, however, much of Anouilh's later work was directed by the prominent Paris scenic designer André Barsacq, who had taken over as director of the Théâtre de l'Atelier after Charles Dullin's retirement in 1940. Barsacq was a champion for Anouilh, and their affiliation was a major factor in the playwright's continued success after the war.
Playwright
In the 1940s, Anouilh turned from contemporary tales to more mythical, classic, and historic subjects. With protagonists who asserted their independence from the fated past, themes during this period are more closely related to the existential concerns of such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The most famous play of this group is Antigone, which "established Anouilh as a leading dramatist, not only because of the power with which he drew the classic confrontation between the uncompromising Antigone and the politically expedient Creon, but also because French theatre-goers under the occupation read the play as a contemporary political parable." His post-war plays dealt with similar concerns and included Roméo et Jeannette, Médée, and Anouilh's Joan of Arc story L'Alouette, which, in its distinct optimism, rivalled the commercial success of Antigone.Anouilh himself grouped his plays of this period on the basis of their dominant tone, publishing his later works in collected volumes to reflect what he felt "represented the phases of his evolution and loosely resembled the distinction between comedy and tragedy." Pièces noires or "Black plays" were tragedies or realistic dramas and included Antigone, Jézabel, and La Sauvage. This category typically featured "young, idealistic, and uncompromising protagonists are able to maintain their integrity only by choosing death." By contrast, Anouilh's pièces roses or "pink plays" were comedies where fantasy dominated with an atmosphere similar to that of fairy tales. In these plays such as Le Bal des voleurs, Le Rendez-vous de Senlis and Léocadia, the focus is on "the burden of the environment and especially of the past on a protagonist seeking a happier, freer existence."
Most of Anouilh's plays of the late 1940s and into the 1950s become darker and distinctly cruel and, in contrast with his earlier works, begin to feature middle-aged characters who must view life more practically than Anouilh's former idealistic youths. The playwright divided the works of this period into pièces brillantes and pièces grinçantes. The first group includes works such as L'Invitation au château and Colombe, and are typified by aristocratic settings and witty banter. The grating plays like La Valse des toréadors and Le Réactionnaire amoureux are more bitterly funny, trading clever word play for a darker tone of disillusionment.
Another category Anouilh specifies are his pièces costumées which include The Lark, La Foire d'Empoigne, and Becket, an international success, depicting the historical martyr Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who sought to defend the church against the monarch, Henry II of England, who had appointed him to his see. So classified because they share historical "costumed" settings, Anouilh also specifies that these plays must also prominently feature an enlightened protagonist seeking "a moral path in a world of corruption and manipulation."
Anouilh's final period begins with La Grotte, in which he comments on his own progress as a writer and a theatre artist. The central character is a playwright suffering from writer's block who in his frustration recalls the foibles of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Anouilh's work had always contained hints of metatheatricality, or commentary on the business of theatre within the world of the play, but in his late works these structures became more fully developed as he begins to write primarily about characters who are dramatists or theatre directors. There is also a pronounced link, during this time, of Anouilh's emphasis of theatre and the family, displaying intimate relationships that are "more profound and more important than the traditional heightened action of 'theatre. Antoine, the playwright-protagonist of Cher Antoine; ou, L'Amour raté, asserts that the world must take notice of these pièces secrètes and Anouilh scholars have proposed this name, pièces secrètes, to classify the collected works of his latest period."