Jean Anouilh

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Anouilh, Jean (1910–87), playwright. Often called the leading French dramatist of his day, he observed both the lighter and darker sides of life with an essentially rueful wit. Unfortunately he was not always well served by his American translators and producers. Among the American mountings of his work were Antigone (1946), Ring around the Moon (1950), Mademoiselle Colombe (1954), Thieves' Carnival (1955), The Lark (1955), Waltz of the Toreadors (1957), The Fighting Cock (1959), and Becket (1960).

The French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-1987) was an accomplished craftsman. His plays, from the frivolous and fanciful to the serious, exploit the artificiality of the theater to elucidate his views of the human predicament.

Jean Anouilh was born in Cérisole, near Bordeaux, on June 23, 1910. His father, a tailor, and his mother, a violinist in an orchestra, undoubtedly imparted to their son respect for craftsmanship and a love of art. Anouilh received his primary and secondary education in Paris, where he later studied law for a year and a half. In 1929 he went to work in an advertising agency, for which he wrote publicity and comic film scripts for 2 years. After a period in military service, he was briefly (1931-1932) secretary to the great actor and director Louis Jouvet and married Monelle Valentin, an actress who later created the roles of many of Anouilh's heroines.

From early childhood Anouilh had been fascinated by the stage. He haunted theaters and was writing plays at the age of 12. Like many a stagestruck youth, he tended to confuse real life with the theater, a view which led him to sacrifice in his early plays substance for theatricality. Undaunted by Jouvet's lack of encouragement and by the near or total failure of his first plays, Anouilh stubbornly resolved to devote his life to the theater. Success came in 1937 with Le Voyageur sans bagages (Traveler without Luggage). Anouilh's popularity steadily increased in the next two decades both in France and abroad.

Profoundly impressed by the plays of Jean Giraudoux and Luigi Pirandello, which broke with the tradition of the realistic theater, Anouilh recognized the value of poetry, of illusion and fantasy, and of irony as a means of portraying basic truths about human life. He held the growing conviction that the essence of the theater, that is, its quality of make-believe, mirrors the pretense and self-delusion of life; this led him to exploit the artificiality of the theater as a way of exposing the falsity of men's motives and even of their allegedly noblest principles and sentiments.

Anouilh's constant preoccupation with the technical production of his plays gradually led him to the role of director. In this capacity he produced, in line with his own views, plays by others, including Moli'e, as well as his own.

Completely absorbed in his work, Anouilh avoided other involvements and chose a secluded private life. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he married another actress, Charlotte Chardon, in 1953. One of his children, Catherine, also an actress, starred in her father's plays.

Although Anouilh grouped his plays in several categories according to their predominant tone - pi'es (plays) roses (pink), noires (black), brillantes (brilliant), grinçantes (jarring), costumées (costumed), and baroques (baroque) - they all offer a unified and ever-deepening view of the human condition. His characteristic heroes are essentially rebels, revolting in the name of an inner ideal of purity against compromise with the immoral demands of family, social position, or their past. The fanciful or uncompromising efforts of the early heroes to escape from reality give way in most of the later plays to a profound bitterness caused by the recognition that no escape is possible. Among Anouilh's most admired plays are Le Bal des voleurs (1932; Thieves' Carnival), Antigone (1942), L'Invitation au château (1947; adapted as Ring Round the Moon), La Valse des toréadors (1951; The Waltz of the Toreadors), L'Alouette (1952; adapted as The Lark), Becket (1959), and Ne réveillez pas madame Don't Wake the Lady).

Anouilh died on October 3, 1987, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Further Reading

The most exhaustive general study of Anouilh in English is Edward Owen Marsh, Jean Anouilh, Poet of Pierrot and Pantaloon (1953). John E. Harvey makes an excellent study of his dramaturgy in Anouilh: A Study in Theatrics (1964), and Leonard Cabell Pronko concentrates on the themes and dramatic values in The World of Jean Anouilh (1961).

Falb, Lewis W., Jean Anouilh (Frederick Ungar, 1977).

New York Times (October 5, 1987).

Anouilh, Jean (b Bordeaux, 23 June 1910, d Lausanne, 3 Oct. 1987). French playwright. His 1932 ballet for actors Le Bal des voleurs was re-choreographed by Massine (Nervi, 1960) and revived for Royal Ballet (London, 1963). He wrote several librettos for Petit including Les Demoiselles de la nuit (1948).

Anouilh, Jean (1910-87). Playwright whose prolific output, craftsmanship, versatility, and sustained commercial success over fifty years made him a phenomenon of the 20th-c. French stage. After a period writing advertising copy and additional dialogue for films, he entered the theatre as secretary to Jouvet. Of his earliest plays, Jézabel (1932) was unperformed and L'Hermine (1932), Mandarine (1933), and Y avait un prisonnier (1935) were unsuccessful. Thereafter, influenced by Molière, Shaw, Pirandello, and Giraudoux, he produced a stream of plays which won him an international public.

Though Anouilh is never uninteresting, his plays are uneven: he can be facile and meretricious as well as moving, imaginative, and inventive. His is pre-eminently a theatre of illusion. He creates an artificial, self-consistent, and autonomous stage-world in which pretence and make-believe of a showy kind are central. He then artfully draws attention to what is false in this world, inviting his audience to be accomplices in a shared game. He does this in several ways. He introduces many characters who are professional actors, like Madame Alexandra in Colombe (1951); or else openly exploits stock characters: sweet innocents, eccentric aristocrats, cuckolds, fire-eating generals. He scatters his work with echoes, or sly pastiche, of major dramatists: Molière in Ornifle (1955), Chekhov in Cher Antoine (1969). He revels in the ‘device of the play within a play, especially in La Répétition (1950), where his own play is about the rehearsal of a play by Marivaux. He seizes on threadbare dramatic conventions: gross melodrama in L'Hermine, bedroom farce in La Valse des toréadors (1952). In fact, he pushes to its limit Shakespeare's ‘all the world's’ a stage’, using this basic figure to articulate a great variety of dramatic modes, themes, and moods.

The categories Anouilh applies to his plays do at least indicate the range: pièces noires, roses, brillantes, costumées, baroques, secrètes. The gamut runs from anguish, wounded idealism, and misanthropic pessimism to sentimental charm and gaily exuberant fantasy. What animates many of his plays is the clash between exacting heroes and heroines obsessed with their personal integrity (‘pureté’), with being true to themselves, and their all-too-human antagonists who are ready to come to terms with life. The idealists go down to a kind of ritual defeat, often causing havoc in the process. Such are: Frantz of L'Hermine, who commits murder to keep his love for Monime ‘immaculate’; Thérèse of La Sauvage (1938), who sacrifices happiness with Florent out of solidarity with her appalling parents; the eponymous heroine of Antigone (1944), who dies rather than be false to her own ideals; the spinster aunt who commits suicide with her hunchback lover in Ardèle (1948); Jeanne d'Arc, who goes to the stake in L'Alouette (1953) so as to remain true to her vision; the archbishop, who spurns the king's friendship and accepts martyrdom in Becket (1959) rather than change his beliefs.

In Anouilh's earlier theatre, the only release from the pressures of this stubborn integrity lies in pure escapism. The amnesic Gaston's exit in Le Voyageur sans bagage (1937) is a scene of tender fantasy at variance with the pain of his dilemma; Lucien's escape to a new life in Africa in Roméo et Jeannette (1946) hangs on the casual device of an unexpected letter; the prince's return to happiness in Léocadia (1940) occurs in a sort of romantic never-never land, as does that of the melancholy twin among the opulence of L'Invitation au château (1947). In the plays of the 1960s and 1970s, tragic intensity and buoyant escapist charm, so present in the earlier theatre, tend to be replaced by persistent, and sometimes sour, pessimism expressed in black farces like Pauvre Bitos (1956), his harsh cartoon of revolutionary fanaticism, and Le Boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron (1968), or melancholy comedies like Cher Antoine. Interesting in these later plays is the rehabilitation of compromise, as signalled in the figure of Louis XVIII in La Foire d'empoigne (1962).

[S. Beynon John]

Bibliography

• J. Harvey, Anouilh: A Study in Theatrics (1964)
• H. G. McIntyre, The Theatre of Anouilh (1981)

Quotes:

"An ugly sight, a man who is afraid."

"With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil."

"Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes."

"To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It's easy to say no, even if it means dying."

"There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy."

"Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors. If they only knew that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it."

See more famous quotes by Jean Anouilh

• Born: Jun 23, 1910 in Bordeaux, France
• Died: Oct 03, 1987 in Lausanne, Switzerland
• Occupation: Writer, Director
• Active: '40s-'60s
• Major Genres: Romance, Drama
• Career Highlights: Monsieur Vincent, Becket, A Time for Loving
• First Major Screen Credit: Le Voyageur Sans Bagages (1943)

Biography

Jean Anouilh
Born	Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh 21 June 1910(1910-06-21) Bordeaux, France
Died	3 October 1987 (aged 77) Lausanne, Switzerland
Occupation	Dramatist
Nationality	France
Notable work(s)	The Lark; Becket; Traveler without Luggage; Antigone; Mademoiselle Colombe
Notable award(s)	Prix mondial Cino Del Duca
Spouse(s)	Monelle Valentin (m. 1931) Nicole Lançon (1953-1987)

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Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃n anujə] - not, as often mispronounced French pronunciation: [anwi]; 23 June 1910 – 3 October 1987) was a French dramatist.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Career 1.3 Private life 2 Analysis 3 Work 4 References 5 External links

Biography

Early years

Anouilh was born in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux and had Basque ancestry. His father 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, a violinist who supplemented the family's meager income by playing summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon.

He attended école primaire supérieure where he received his secondary education at the Collège 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. Anouilh enrolled as a law student in the University of Paris, only to abandon the course after just eighteen months when he found employment in the advertising industry. 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 drafting copy.

Career

In 1932, his first play, L’Hermine, written in 1929, was unsuccessful, but he followed it up with a string of others. He struggled through years of poverty producing several plays until he eventually wound up as secretary to the great actor-director Louis Jouvet. He quickly discovered he could not get along with this gruff man and left his company. During the Nazi occupation of France, Anouilh did not openly take sides, though he published the play Antigone, often viewed as his most famous work. The play criticises - in an allegorical manner - collaborationism with the Nazis. Mostly keeping aloof from politics, Anouilh also clashed with de Gaulle in the 1950s.

In 1964, Anouilh's play Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu (Becket or The Honor of God) was made into a successful film, starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. The screenwriter who adapted it, Edward Anhalt, won an Academy Award for his screenplay.

Anouilh himself grouped his plays on the basis of their dominant tone: "black" (tragedies and realistic plays), "pink" (where fantasy dominates), "brilliant" ('pink' and 'black' combined in aristocratic environments), "jarring" ('black' plays with bitter humour), "costumed" (historical characters feature), "baroque", and my failures (mes fours).

In 1970 his work was recognized with the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

Private life

Anouilh married actress Monelle Valentin in 1931. In 1953, he married his second wife, Nicole Lançon, who survived him at his death on 3 October 1987.

Analysis

In many of his plays, Jean Anouilh presents his reader with a striking and ineluctable dichotomy between idealism and realism. Pucciani tells us that "in Anouilh, no middle ground of ambiguity exists where this conflict is resolved." This can be seen in his play Le Voyageur Sans Bagage, where the main character Gaston, is a WWI veteran who suffers from amnesia. He does not remember his past that was filled with his moral depravity (he slept with his brother's wife and severely injured his best friend, among examples). This moral depravity is invariably at odds with the extreme purity that he now exhibits and is the antithesis of his past. In another play L'Hermine, the main character finds himself in a world hostile to his romantic idealism. In L'Hermine, love is made to fight an inexorable and futile battle against money, social status, ambition, and lax morals.

This is the essence of what Jean Anouilh offers us: a battle between idealism and realism - a man, a hopeless romantic, is locked in a perpetual battle against a society that is hostile to his purity. In his Pièces Roses, the protagonist finds a compromise. Not an ideal one, but an acceptable accommodation with which he can live his life. But in Anouilh's 'Pièces Noires', the battle is lost from the beginning and the character is doomed to a harrowing fate.

Work

• L'Hermine (The Ermine) (1932)
• Mandarine (1933)
• Y avait un prisonnier (There Was a Prisoner) (1935)
• Le voyageur sans bagage (Traveler without Luggage) (1937)
• La sauvage (Restless Heart) (1938)
• Le Bal des Voleurs (Thieves' Carnival) (1938)
• Léocadia (Time Remembered) (1940)
• Eurydice (Point of Departure and Legend of Lovers) (1941)
• Le rendez-vous de Senlis (The Rendezvous at Senlis and Dinner with the Family) (1941)
• Antigone (1942)
• Roméo et Jeannette (Romeo and Jeannette) (1946)
• Médée (Medea) (1946)
• L'Invitation au Château (Ring Round the Moon) (1947)
• Ardèle ou la Marguerite (Ardèle; The Cry of the Peacock) (1948)
• La répétition ou l'amour puni (The Rehearsal) (1950)
• Colombe (Mademoiselle Colombe) (1951)
• La valse des toréadors (The Waltz of the Toreadors) (1952)
• L'Alouette (The Lark) (1952)
• Cecile, ou L'ecole des pères (Cecile or School for Fathers) (1954)
• Ornifle ou le courant d'air (Ornifle or It's Later than you Think) (1955)
• Pauvre Bitos ou le dîner de têtes (Poor Bitos, or The Masked Dinner) (1956)
• L'hurluberlu ou le réactionnaire amoureux (The Fighting Cock) (1959)
• La petite Molière (1959)
• Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu (Becket or The Honor of God) (1959)
• La Grotte (The Cavern) (1961)
• fables(1962)
• Le boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron (1968)
• Cher Antoine; ou l'amour raté (Dear Antoine; or The Love that Failed) (1969)
• Les poissons rouges; ou Mon père, ce héros (The Goldfish) (1970)
• Tu étais si gentil quand tu étais petit (You Were So Nice When You Were Young) (1972)
• Monsieur Barnett (1974)
• L'Arrestation (1975)
• Chers zoizeaux (1976)
• Vive Henri IV (1978)
• La Culotte (1978)
• La Foire d'empoigne (Catch as Catch Can) (1979)
• Le Nombril (The Navel) (1981)

References

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean Anouilh

Literature portal

• "Jean Anouilh (1910-1987)". Pegasos. 2008. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/anouilh.htm. Retrieved 2008-09-15. 
• One Act: Eleven Short Plays of the Modern Theatre (1961) Grove Press

External links

• Jean Anouilh at the Internet Broadway Database
• Jean Anouilh at the Internet Movie Database

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