Jean Anouilh: A prolific talent

Press, 6 October 1987, Page 10

Jean Anouilh: A prolific talent

NZPA-Reuter Paris The prolific and individual talent of the French dramatist, Jean Anouilh, whose death was announced on Sunday, brought him success over five decades and was a telling response to critics of his ability and political views. A writer with an acute feeling for dialogue in the tradition of French classics, he was, in his last years, the most frequently performed playwright in France. A critic, Francois Chalais, of the daily "France Soir” described him as “solitary, if not unique, angry yet pathetic, arrogant but humble, solid yet vulnerable.” His wartime master-

piece “Antigone,” produced in 1944'with bombs falling outside, was regarded as an example to the French Resistance battling the Nazi occupation. Yet in later years he was accused of pessimism and Right-wing anarchism.

“He will, always be considered as an arrogant, embittered playwright of facile humour, clumsy and sometimes too heavy,” Colette Godard, drama critic of “Le Monde,” told Reuters. Rejecting the main trends of postwar French theatre, Anouilh -'ploughed his own dramatic furrow. Common to much of his work was a vision of purity and tenderness tinged with mediocrity and/ debasement por-

trayed in a crisp, efficient style combining commonplaces with originality. Jean-Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was born in the southwestern French city of Bordeaux on June 23, 1910, the of a tailor. He was educated in Bordeaux and later in Paris, where he attended the same * school. as the actor Jean-Louis Barrault He studied law at uni-, versity but never graduated as he felt his father could not afford the fees, so he took an advertising job with a company where he met the poet Jacques Prevert One day he was introduced to the late Louis Jouvet who was running

the Comedie des Champs Elysees theatre, who asked him to become his administrator. Anouilh wrote his first play at 19, but his first success was “The Ermine” in 1932. He then decided to earn a living exclusively through plays, of which he wrote about 40 in ail. “I am a comic misanthropist,” he said. "I am surrounded by foulness, the world is foul and it is plain to see.” Anouilh has frequently been labelled conservative or reactionary. He rejected only the former term. “I am not a conservative but surely a reactionary, for the future is made of reaction,” he said.