Obaldia, René de (b. 1918). French writer, born in Hong Kong. Best known as a playwright, he has also written poems and novels. His plays resemble Ionesco's in their verbal playfulness, though with narrower metaphysical horizons. They have an expansive comic force created by pursuing an absurd proposition to its logical limits. In Genousie (1960) it is the substitution of an imaginary language for French; in Du vent dans les branches de sassafras (1965), an accident-prone cowboy; in Le Cosmonaute agricole (1965), a spaceman falling to earth in a farming community. The later is more typical of his later works, such as Deux femmes pour un fantôme (1971), where the fantasy is rooted more in satire of the modern world.

[David Whitton]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.