A Theatre of the Everyday: the Plays of Michel Vinaver

Abstract

It has only been in the last few years that the plays of Michel Vinaver have begun to be discovered and produced in Britain. Yet he has been working as a playwright in his native France since 1955, and has become increasingly respected and widely produced there since overcoming a seven-year ‘writer's block’ in 1967. Here, David Bradby's introduction to Vinaver's dramaturgy is followed by a detailed analysis of one of his most recent plays, L'Emission de télévision, and this critical material is complemented by a chronology of Vinaver's career, excerpted statements by and about the writer – including an ‘auto-interview’ of Vinaver by Vinaver – and a bibliography. David Bradby is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London: he has published widely, especially on the French theatre, and his major study, Modern French Drama, 1940–1990, has recently appeared in a revised edition from Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a study of Vinaver for the University of Michigan Press. Michel Vinaver's own assessment of the present state of French theatre funding was included in NTQ25 (1991).