Jean Anouilh Research Articles

Franchir les obstacles murés dans « Le Quatrième » mur de Chalandon

This article explores the symbolism of the „wall,” paradoxically representing both oppression and protection in Sorj Chalandon’s Le Quatrième mur (2013). It highlights how theater, framed within the novel, breaks down barriers separating individuals by bringing together young people from conflicting communities during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). The intertextuality of Jean Anouilh’s play Antigone, analyzed in the article, offers an opportunity to redefine symbolic obstacles („walls”) while examining the notion of an inevitable destiny present in the novel. Under Chalandon’s pen, theater becomes a real lifeline and rhetorical weapon of resistance, surpassing the impasse of politics, reviving the memory of Sabra and Chatila (1982), and allowing the process of mourning after the carnage of war.

Colin Buchanan Radford (1931–2022)

Colin Buchanan Radford was raised by his grandparents in a modest Nottingham household. His love for French, drama, and performance was instilled by a housemaster at the school where he was educated from the age of seven, and where he became a keen cricketer and county shot-putter. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery, and was stationed in what was known then as British Malaya. His PhD thesis, on ‘The Role of Woman in Twentieth-Century French Drama’, was completed in 1970 at Queen’s University Belfast, and he delivered his inaugural lecture, ‘A Dramatist in Search of His Public’, on Armand Salacrou, in QUB in 1975. He published a number of pieces on French theatre, and co-authored, with Christopher Shorley and Mary Hossain, Signposts to French Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1988), a wide-ranging introduction to the canonical authors of French literature, and a staple of the A-level classroom for many years. Colleagues in Queen’s remember Colin first and foremost for the major part he played in shaping French studies at Queen’s in the 1970s and 1980s, as Professor and Head of the Department of French, as Head of the newly formed School of Modern Languages in the early 1990s, and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He was a specialist in French drama, ahead of his time in examining the role and representation of women in French theatre, and also a pioneer in teaching twentieth-century and, in some cases, living authors. For Colin, French drama was not just an academic pursuit: he was synonymous with, and widely remembered for, the ‘French play’ — produced in the Group Theatre, Belfast, and elsewhere. He spearheaded the production of plays by experimental writers such as Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, and Eugène Ionesco. He is particularly fondly remembered as an inspiring director who instinctively understood how theatre worked: he was able to nurture the talents of even reserved students, and knew how to captivate an audience confronted with challenging, and even uncomfortable, dramatic materials.

Guilt and Extenuation in Tragedy: Variations on Racinian Excuses. By Edward Forman

This comparative literary study seeks to re-evaluate the relationship between tragic drama and current approaches to guilt and extenuation. Edward Forman aims to place side by side ‘ancient stories with modern attitudes’, ‘the deadly serious against the cynical, the defensive and the legalistic’ (p. 3), and thus bring further insight into how we think about responsibility, justification, and guilt. Although Forman explicitly states that this is a work of literary criticism and not moral philosophy, the book clearly draws on ethics. However, it also engages with performance and reception theory. The book ranges widely but its springboard is Racine’s tragedies. The seven chapters wrestle with modern judicial concepts such as diminished responsibility, provocation, trauma, ignorance, and scapegoating by examining specifically how the characters in tragedy respond and justify their actions. Forman, interestingly, maps these onto the tragic explorations of such issues, considering ‘Helplessness’ (with fatalism, divine authority, and genetic determinism) in Chapter 1, ‘Theories of Harmartia’ in Chapter 2, and blindness and credulity in Chapter 3. Tragic archetypes such as Phaedra, Oedipus, Clytemnestra, and Medea are studied, and case studies of ancient models, seventeenth-century texts, and more modern interpretations are presented in contrast with one another. Chapter 5, for example, considers different portrayals of Clytemnestra: in Racine’s Iphigénie, in which Clytemnestre shows her boundless resentment towards Agamemnon and seems to justify what she goes on to commit; in Jean Giraudoux’s Électre, where she is by no means a sympathetic character; and in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mouches, where she is presented as a more passive accomplice. The chapter also explores Marguerite Yourcenar’s depiction in Électre ou La Chute des masques, in which Clytemnestre argues for her diminished responsibility, as well as examining the different inflections of the character in works by Jean Anouilh, the lesser-known dramatist Jean-Jacques Varoujean, and Jean-Pierre Giraudoux, all of which emphasize her status as a damaged victim. Showcasing these variations in degrees of blame and accountability reveals how playwrights and audiences do not simply judge the characters for their crimes but constantly attempt to make sense of their behaviour within the particular worlds they inhabit. The figures used as vehicles for such explorations are generally from ancient Greek myths, but Chapter 6 also productively engages with the biblical figure of King Saul who, as Forman notes, recurs in plays ‘from the Classical, Enlightenment, Romantic and modern periods, all of which probe the extent to which Saul was in control of his actions’ (p. 153). At times, it feels as though the book is trying to cover too much terrain and one suspects that longer studies of particular plays might have been more fruitful. Forman repeatedly asks to what extent modern understandings of criminal behaviour ought to point towards a reinterpretation of ancient myths and dramas, but his answer is ultimately that it is somewhat inevitable that contemporary ­experience and debate will bring a different perspective to plays ­written in different ethical and legal contexts. Rather frustratingly, he does not extend this reflection on the illuminating potential of such juxtapositioning.

Una Antígona para tiempos de supervivencia: Lo heroico y lo sucio en Antígona del dramaturgo cubano Yerandy Fleites

Abstract: This essay analyzes Antígona (2008) by Yerandy Fleites to show how the author tackles the current Cuban political situation by rewriting the Sophoclean tragedy. Fleites adjusts the Greek myth to the Cuban context by means of parody and an intertextual dialogue with both Jean Anouilh's Antigone (1944) and Peruvian poet José Watanabe's Antígona (2000). The study then unpacks the idea of dirtiness and Fleites' depiction of the female heroine to demonstrate how the dramatist proposes hybris as the main psychological driver behind the Cuban Antígona (and that, to an extent, of the generation she represents) to suggest possible avenues for sociopolitical change. At the same time, this study considers the interpretations of Fleites' Antígona that Cuban directors Pedro Franco and Julio César Ramírez respectively brought to the stage in 2013 and 2020. Ramírez's reading in particular provides an understanding of Antígona in the context of the protests that occurred on November 27, 2020, when intellectuals, writers, and artists demanded that the Cuban Ministry of Culture recognize their rights and their freedom as citizens.

From a Euromodern Biopolitical Antigone to Postmodern Necropolitical Antigones in Latin America

In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone’s adaptations that contrasts Sophocles’ classical tragedy with Jean Anouilh’s Euromodern melodrama and Ariel Dorfman, Patricia Nieto, and Sara Uribe’s postmodern Antigones in Latin America. I offer that history to understand a significant change in sovereign power when the state takes hold of the socially dead rather than living body. Here, I argue, we need to move from the theory of biopolitics to the theory of necropolitics to further explain the role that slavery and its aftermath play in the radicalization of state violence under contemporary neoliberalism. I thus contrast the ancient violence inflicted in the publicly desecrated corpse of Polyneices with the Euromodern violence that misidentifies Polyneices and the postmodern violence that instead disappears not one but many Polyneices. This explains why enforced disappearances figure so prominently among postmodern Latin American Antigones, a form of violence that I trace back to the settler colonial logic of elimination whereby settlers claim nativity to the territory by means of erasing its prior inhabitants.

Reception of Sophocles’ Antigone in the Baltic States

This paper analyzes the translations of Antigone by Sophocles and later authors and the performances based on them in the theaters of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It investigates the necessity to translate the Antigone dramas by Sophocles, Jean Anouilh and Janusz Głowacki into national languages and stage them in theaters. The article analyzes how these works are related to the history of the Baltic countries. This paper is divided into three subparts that match the historical periods from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The most important performances of Antigone in the Baltic countries are analyzed, highlighting the individual style of each director and their attention to the form and expression of the performances. The main themes revealed by the artists of the Baltic countries are conscious self-sacrifice for one’s neighbor and individual resistance to conformity and tyranny.

The image of Joan of Arc in the play “The Lark” by Jean Anouy

The subject of the analysis in this article is the play “The Lark” by the French playwright Jean Anouilh. This play is one of the most striking attempts of the French writer to draw the ideal of a person. The object of the study is the originality of the presentation of the image of Joan of Arc. Techniques and ways of creating a positive character in a dramatic work are being clarified. The author shows the transformation of the image of the main character in world literature. The author analyzes the originality of artistic solutions and the role of tradition in the structure of this tragedy. The scientific novelty of this article consists in the fact that the play "The Lark" was practically not subjected to serious analysis. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the originality of the image of the main character has put Jean Anouilh in front of a difficult problem of understanding the image not just as a national ideal, but also as a human ideal in general. The French playwright creates an original interpretation of the life and deeds of Joan of Arc. To do this, on the one hand, he turns to the tradition of the ancient Greek theater, essentially recreating the ancient choir on the stage, on the other hand, he actively uses discoveries in the field of literature of the twentieth century: violation of the chronotope, ambivalence of heroes, etc. A special contribution of the author to the study is the analysis of the image of Joan of Arc as a positive heroine of universal scale.

Truly Bewept, Full of Strife: The Myth of Antigone, the Burial of Enemies, and the Ideal of Reconciliation in Ancient Greek Literature

In postwar Western culture, the myth of Antigone has been the subject of noted literary, literary-critical, dramatic, philosophical, and philological treatments, not least due to the strong influence of one of the key plays of the twentieth century, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. The rich discussion of the myth has often dealt with its most famous formulation, Sophocles’ Antigone, but has paid less attention to the broader ancient context; the epic sources (the Iliad, Odyssey, Thebaid, and Oedipodea); the other tragic versions (Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes and his lost Eleusinians; Euripides’s Suppliants, Phoenician Women, and Antigone, of which only a few short fragments have been preserved); and the responses of late antiquity. This paper analyses the basic features of this nearly thousand-year-long ancient tradition and shows how they connect in surprising ways – sometimes even more directly than Sophoclean tragedy does – with the main issues in some unique contemporary traditions of its reception (especially the Slovenian, Polish and Argentine ones): the question of burying the wartime (or postwar) dead and the ideal of reconciliation.

L'impact du passé dans Le Voyageur sans bagage de Jean Anouilh (la mémoire, le passé, la société, l'enfance(

The position which it occupies the part the Traveller Without Luggage in the theatre of Jean Anouilh is not déniable. The praise which it received from the critics and the readers comes from its treatment of the topics of the world company of the post-war period, like the past and lost happiness, rich person of reflections and remainder of the current events the continuation of a serious wound peandant the world war, Gaston the hero of the part, son of a rich French family became unbeknownst to its true personality. His memory is waked up of its coma by the accounts of its close relations on his horrible adolesence. The exit of this dead end is not possible that with the lapse of memory of its past with the purity of childhood. Against this challenge, the events of the part report the way in which Gaston carried out his combat to become the being of which it dreamed.

Hagop Der Balian, Mémoires d’un survivant du génocide des Arméniens: d’Adana à Mossoul

Long before the great Parisian shoemaker Sarkis Der Balian was making beautiful footwear for the likes of Marie Curie, Salvador Dali, Greta Garbo, and Jean Anouilh, he watched his sister die of foot gangrene from walking unshod on a forced march in Cilicia in 1915-1916. His family’s story within the larger story of the Armenian genocide could have led Sarkis down other career paths – perhaps as a surgeon after watching a brother die of a bowel obstruction from swallowing gold pieces on the sa...

« La lutte des sexes », ou les stéréotypes sur les femmes dans Une vie secrète de Lenormand, La Valse des toréadors d’Anouilh et Capitaine Bada de Vauthier

August Strindberg is considered the herald of modern drama. His protean work, which goes from naturalism to mystical aesthetics, anticipating surrealism and the theater of the absurd, even today defies, as it did in his epoch, by its brutal or cruel aspects. Without any doubt, the origin of a certain mistrust towards the author of Inferno would be his declared misogyny. It could be criticized on this subject for disclosing prejudices against women, which in the form of stereotypes, survive to this day. Nevertheless, many French playwrights are inspired by the infernal conflict between man and woman that the Swede describes with a stripping frenzy. Indeed, by analyzing the plays of the French theater of the first half of the 20th century, we notice that some authors take up the motive of the “struggle of the sexes” that will be reworked or “modernized” in their own way. It is interesting in this regard to study the vehicular discourse of clichés on women, found in the works of writers such as Henri-René Lenormand (A Secret Life), Jean Anouilh (Waltz of the Toreadors) and Jean Vauthier (Captain Bada). While none of these playwrights has ever openly declared their hostility to the so-called weaker sex, their texts provide a valuable reservoir of common ground on male-female relationships, which in most cases have not lost their actuality.

“As Inspiring as the Muses, as Righteous as the Supreme Court”: The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and Jurisprudential Drama

Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is based upon the transcript of a 1968 trial, during which Berrigan himself – Jesuit priest, prolific poet, and peace activist – and eight other members of the Catholic clergy and laity were indicted after incinerating over three hundred Vietnam draft files in protest against the war. A documentary verse drama, noteworthy for its complex, allusive structure, the play is traversed by a network of quotations from texts including Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona, Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Manner of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, Jean Anouilh’s Becket, and Sophocles’ Antigone. Berrigan’s play thus engages with, and positions itself within, a rich tradition of legal or jurisprudential drama, a trans-historical mode of dramatic expression structured around juridical performance, jurisdictional conflict, and jurisprudential enquiry. Reading these interpolated passages alongside the versified trial transcript and Berrigan’s own library, this article interrogates the function and significance of this intertextual network, both as an act of genre formation and as an alternative jurisdiction for the readjudication of the Catonsville proceedings.

First as Creon, then as Chorus: Slavoj Žižek’s Antigone

The article critically evaluates The Three Lives of Antigone, Slavoj Žižek’s first dramatic work. Žižek’s polemical rewriting of Sophocles’ tragedy is examined in the broader perspective of Žižek’s philosophy and other Antigones: those of Sophocles, Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht and Dominik Smole. Slavoj Žižek has interpreted Sophocles’ Antigone in numerous philosophical works. In his earlier treatises, he mainly gave a cautious summary of Hegel’s, Heidegger’s and Lacan’s theses on Antigone; lately, however, Žižek’s attitude to Sophocles’ Antigone has grown decidedly negative. The main point in Žižek’s critique of Sophocles’ tragedy is that his Antigone is not an appropriate symbol of genuine social revolt. Based on this conviction, Žižek contrived his own version of Antigone with an alternative ending in which the choir carries out a revolution and condemns Antigone to death. It is argued in the article that Žižek’s dramatic project fails to convince. It is essentially a superficial apology for political violence, which can ultimately only be understood as a veiled defence of the political status quo.

Antigone, today

The tragedy of Antigone revolves around the theme of conflict. Both the version written by Sophocles and the one by Jean Anouilh are mainly focused on conflicts. The conflict between Antigone and Creon is real and symbolic at the same time. It is the conflict between a woman’s body and the law, between women’s and men’s conditions, between two anthropologies. It is also a conflict between two opposite ethical perspectives, and two opposite political visions. It is the conflict between the rule of individuals and the rule of laws, between non-violence and violence, social responsibility and individual egoism, and self-identification and identity. The conflict between Antigone and Creon is the heterogeneous sum of many conflicts. If we try to fit all conflicts within a broader framework, we could say that Antigone’s choice of disobedience raises the high-level conflict between human dignity and the law. This conflict takes place within the positive law and cannot exist outside it. Human dignity cannot elude the law, since it is rooted within the legal system. It does not, however, originate from it, but its finalisation is actually in the law; where gaps and fallacies are revealed. Its strength lies in the lack of a definition. Human dignity helps the law to regenerate and not become locked in a formal stronghold.

Translated Plays as a Force for Social Justice

During the current political crisis in Thailand, people hold various political standpoints. Despite these different stances, the goal for many of these differences remains the same, namely, a just society. The research Translated Plays as a Force for Social Justice is an attempt to advocate the role of literature in creating social justice. The purpose of the research is to study issues of social justice in translated plays and to suggest ways in which the Thai academic community and Thai society can use plays to advocate social justice. This research studies translations of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Bertolt Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The study finds that these plays pose challenging questions which help raise an awareness of the importance of social justice. Critics and theatre practitioners in the West have created a number of works on these plays that help advance social justice. Nonetheless, the issues of social justice in these plays are often ignored by Thai critics and theater practitioners and, because of this, some of them unintentionally offer an interpretation or a production, which is not in line with the concept of social justice.

Игра в Чехова на французской сцене: ностальгия по усадьбе или ностальгия по игре? («Дорогой Антуан…» Жана Ануя)

Игра в Чехова на французской сцене: ностальгия по усадьбе или ностальгия по игре? («Дорогой Антуан…» Жана Ануя)

Introduction: Shaw in Performance

Introduction: Shaw in Performance

La tragedia hoy: dos reescrituras contemporáneas del mito de Antígona

The still hot question of whether tragedy is possible today is discussed by great critics such as George Steiner [1963] and Albin Lesky [1957] with positions that do not fully coincide. We will compare here their proposals, and to this end we will analyse from both perspectives two contemporary rewritings of the myth of Antigone: Antigone [1942] by the French playwright Jean Anouilh and La tumba de Antigona [The Tomb of Antigone, 1967] by the Spanish philosopher and writer Maria Zambrano, which, as we shall see, maintain a dissimilar intertextual relationship with Sophocles’ Antigone.

Quelques réflexions sur l’amitié sur l’exemple de „Becket ou l’honneur de Dieu” de Jean Anouilh

A FEW REFLEXIONS ON THE FRIENDSHIP IN BECKET OR THE HONOUR OF GOD BY JEAN ANOUILHThe above work is a conjecture on a new interpretation of the complicated friendship between Henry II, King of England, and Thomas Becket, saint martyr, as characters in Jean Anouilh’s play Becket or The Honour of God. They have little in common, and it seems that everything divides them. An analysis of this opus is used as a starting point to a general reflection on the influence of external factors such as social status and political framework, as well as internal factors such as personality traits, value system, and propriety on particular stages of friendship. The analysis is also an attempt at defining the concept of friendship presented in the play.

The theme of death, in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone

The theme of death, in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone