Arthur Adamov

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Adamov, Arthur. (1908-70). Russian-born playwright whose family moved to Paris in 1924. He was associated with the Surrealists, developed an interest in Freudian analysis, and published a psychoanalytical autobiography, L'Aveu (1946), before turning to the theatre as a means of exorcizing his neuroses. His dramatic career covered two distinct phases. His early works (L'Invasion, La Parodie, Le Sens de la marche, Tous contre tous, and Le Professeur Taranne) were influenced by Strindberg and have affinities with the expressionist plays of Kaiser and Toller. With anonymous characters and locations, they project the inner world of a central author-character by means of anguished dream-like images of loneliness, persecution, and mutilation. Written between 1947 and 1953, and performed during the 1950s, they are often considered to be the most uncompromisingly bleak manifestations of the Theatre of the Absurd.

In 1954-5, influenced by the discovery of Brecht and his association with Planchon, he repudiated his earlier plays for their nihilism and lack of historical perspective. The theatre, he said, had to deal with both the incurable and the curable aspects of life. The incurable aspect was the fear of death, which had been the well-spring of his writing to then. The curable aspect was the social one, ignored by the absurdists. Ping-Pong (1955), depicting two young men whose lives are consumed by a pinball machine, marked a movement away from abstractionism and towards social reality. Paolo Paoli (1957), where the central consumer symbols are feathers and exotic butterflies, explores the laws of commerce and capitalism in belle époque society. It is a theatrically complex play, using documentary methods and drawing on Brechtian distanciation techniques. Its première, directed by Planchon, was hailed as the first throughgoing Brechtain production in France. Later committed plays dealt with the Commune (Le Printemps 71, 1961), the judicial system (La Politique des restes, 1962), complacent moderation (M. le modéré, 1968), and the American Dream (Off-limits, 1969).

Although he had few successes in the theatre, Adamov was highly regarded by leading directors such as Vilar, who admired the austerity of his early plays, and Planchon, to whom the Brechtian tendencies of his later plays appealed. He was the first French playwright to share Planchon's conviction of the political importance of mise en scène. The best production of his works was probably Planchon's posthumous tribute to him, A. A. Théâtres d'Adamov, performed at the TNP in 1975.

[David Whitton]

Bibliography

• R. Gaudy, Arthur Adamov (1971)

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