Jean Anouilh

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Jean Anouilh (1940)

Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (born June 23, 1910 in Bordeaux ; † October 3, 1987 in Lausanne ) was a French author who was particularly successful as a dramatist between 1932 and around 1970 and his plays in the 1960s and 1970s as well were frequently performed in Germany.

Life and work

Youth and first dramatic attempts

Jean Anouilh was born in Bordeaux as the son of a tailor and an orchestral musician. His contact with the world of the stage took place in 1919 when he saw the theater performances in the casino in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon , where his mother played in the spa orchestra. In the same year the family moved to Paris. Here he attended the Collège Chaptal (a Catholic high school), where he had the future director Jean-Louis Barrault as a classmate.

At the age of 12 he made his first attempts at writing in the style of the neo-romantic Edmond Rostand . Later he read and saw pieces by Paul Claudel , George Bernard Shaw and especially Luigi Pirandello . As a director, Charles Dullin impressed him . In 1927 he was fascinated by Georges Pitoëff's Hamlet production .

In 1928, after an excellent baccalauréat , he listlessly began to study law, but was more concerned with literature and theater. When he experienced the new piece Siegfried by Jean Giraudoux as a revelation in the same year , he gave up his studies and took a job in an advertising agency (where he claims to have learned "stylistic accuracy and smoothness"). He also wrote his first performance-ready pieces in 1929/30, Humulus le muet (= H. The mute) and La Mandarine . In 1930 he was secretary to the director Louis Jouvet at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées for a few months , but he did not harmonize with him. He then began his military service, but was soon retired and returned to Paris. In 1932 he married the actress Monelle Valentin, with whom he soon had a daughter, Catherine, who later also became an actress and also appeared in the father's plays.

When in the same year, 1932, his new play L'Hermine (The Hermelin) was accepted and had 90 performances, he decided to live as a freelance writer. However, in 1933 the older La Mandarine became a failure. Anouilh therefore worked as a co-writer of film scripts in order to make money. In 1935 Y avait un prisonnier (= once there was a prisoner) was passably successful again with 65 performances; Hollywood even bought the film rights, but the film was never shot.

The years of success

Anouilh's breakthrough came in 1937 with Le Voyageur sans bagages (= traveler without luggage) , staged by Pitoëff. This was followed in 1938, both equally successful, by La Sauvage (= the wild / unruly) and Le Bal des voleurs (= the thieves' ball) , written as early as 1932 , which was his first play to be performed abroad. Le Bal was directed by André Barsacq , who was Anouilh's permanent director for the next ten years.

In 1940 Anouilh was briefly a soldier and a German prisoner of war. After the theaters had reopened in occupied Paris at the end of the year, he was able to have Le Rendez-vous de Senlis (written in 1937) performed in 1941 . Politically, like most of the French, he was on the side of the new head of state Philippe Pétain and the right-wing Vichy regime and wrote occasionally for regime- loyal magazines. Also in 1941 wrote Eurydice (a kind of replica of the pseudo-antique piece Orphée by Jean Cocteau , 1926), which plays in the present, i.e. only pseudo-antiquing , but it was not a success.

In 1941/42 he designed the tragedy-like play Antigone , based on the example of the antiquated pieces Giraudoux ' La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu (The Trojan War does not take place) and above all Électre . In this, he visibly personifies the first resistance fighters in the form of the title heroine and the head of state Pétain in the form of their opponent Créon, whereby he puts the better arguments into the mouth of the latter, but paradoxically shows a lot of sympathy for the former. Antigone was approved by the German censors as early as the fall of 1942, but, as Barsacq had concerns, did not take the stage until February 1944. With Huis clos / Closed Society (1944) by Jean-Paul Sartre, it was one of the most played pieces in Paris during the last months of the occupation and ensured that other pieces by Anouilh were also resumed. In post-war Germany it was part of the repertoire of student theater groups for a long time.

After the liberation of France in 1945, Anouilh failed in an attempt to obtain the pardon of the young author Robert Brasillach , who had been sentenced to death for collaboration , by means of a signature campaign . He was also suspected of being a secret sympathizer of the collaborators. The continued success of the Antigone (700 performances by 1947) helped him get over it.

In the period that followed, Anouilh's private life and drama seemed to merge. Almost every year he wrote a new piece, which was always performed immediately in Paris, in the provinces and abroad. In 1952 La Valse des toréadors / The waltz of the toreros was a world success. Other very successful pieces (among many more, less well-known) were:

  • L'Alouette / Jeanne or The Lark (1953), which treats the story of Joan of Arc in an ironic and pessimistic manner;
  • Pauvre Bitos ou Le dîner de têtes / Poor B. or the dinner of the heads (1956), which castigated the zeal of the post-war justice towards the collaborators and acted as a scandal at a time when the myth of the common Resistance of all French was cultivated;
  • Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu / Becket or the glory of God (1959), a drama that historical in free interpretation of events an episode from the life of King Henry II. Tells of his friend and veteran Thomas Becket to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate appointed by England to secure his political influence over the Church.

1962 Anouilh operated with his Fables , the sarcastic fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) pastichieren , not without success in a very unusual genre.

In 1980 he received the new Grand Prix du Théâtre de l'Académie Française as an award for all of his work . He has also been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times.

Shortly before his death in Lausanne , where he spent the last few years in seclusion , he published under the title La Vicomtesse d'Éristal n'a pas reçu son balai mécanique / The vice countess of E. has not received her carpet sweeper , his memories from the period 1928 to 1945 (German as Life is unheard of ).

Works

  • Jesebel's wife (1932)
  • The Ermine (1932)
  • The Thieves' Ball (1932, Auff. 1938)
  • The Traveler Without Luggage (1936)
  • Rendezvous of Senlis (1937)
  • The Wild (premiered 1938)
  • Léocadia (1940)
  • Eurydice (1941)
  • Antigone (1942)
  • Orestes (1945)
  • Medea (1946)
  • Invitation to the Castle or The Art of Playing the Game (1947)
  • Ardèle or The Daisy (1948)
  • The Rehearsal or The Punished Love (1950)
  • The pigeon (1950)
  • Colombe the White Dove (1951)
  • The waltz of the toreros (1952)
  • Jeanne or The Lark (1953)
  • The Lord Ornifle (1955)
  • Poor Bitos or The Diner of the Heads (1956)
  • The Orchestra (1957)
  • Mademoiselle Molière (1959)
  • Becket or the Glory of God (1959)
  • Majesties (1960)
  • Fables (1962)
  • The Goldfish (1970)
  • La Culotte or The Liberated Women (1978)
  • Life is Outrageous (1987)

A seven-volume German edition was published by Langen-Müller (Munich / Vienna) in 1960.

Anouilh himself published his pieces in nine volumes between 1951 and 1970 in the Paris publishing house La Table ronde , deliberately giving the individual volumes strange-looking titles, e.g. B. Pièces brilliant / shiny pieces or Pièces grinçantes / crunchy pieces .

Film adaptations of own works

  • 1939: The Castle of Love (Cavalcade d'amour) - Director: Raymond Bernard
  • 1947: Monsieur Vincent - Director: Maurice Cloche, Léon Carré - Anouilh collaborated with the screenplay
  • 1948: Deadly Passion (Pattes blanches) - Director: Jean Grémillon
  • 1952: Monsun (Monsoon) - Director: Rodney Amateau - Based on: Play "Romeo and Jeanette"
  • 1961: Waltz of the toreadors - Director: John Guillermin
  • 1963: The rehearsal or punished love - Director: Rainer Wolffhardt
  • 1963: Becket - Director: Peter Glenville
  • 1971: The Paris Apartment (A time for loving) - Director: Christopher Miles
  • 2012: You will still be amazed (Vous n'avez encore rien vu) - Director: Alain Resnais

Scripts based on templates from other authors

literature

  • Jean Firges : Jean Anouilh: “Antigone”. The desire for the absolute. Exemplary series Literature and Philosophy Vol. 14. Sonnenberg, Annweiler 2003, ISBN 978-3-933264-30-5
  • Martin Flügge: Refusal or new order. Jean Anouilh's “Antigone” in the context of the occupation . Rheinfelden 1982
  • Otto Eberhardt: “Antigone” by Anouilh as a representation of a power struggle. The mediation of the previous variety of interpretations in an overall psychological interpretation . In: Die neueeren Sprachen 83, 1984, pp. 171–194
    • The same: Ed., Author of the epilogue and timetable for Jean Anouilh, Antigone / Becket or the honor of God. Spectacles . Translated from Franz Geiger. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1992
  • Gert Pinkernell: Old fabrics, new meaning: Giraudoux 's “ La Guerre de Troie ” and “ Électre ”, Sartre's “ Les mouches ” and Anouilh's “Antigone” . In: Same: interpretations . Heidelberg 1997, pp. 192-206. Available online in the appendix to the Anouilh article in the name, title and dates of the French Literature , see links below
  • Frauke Frausing: Jean Anouilh: Antigone. Series: King's Explanations and Materials , 388. Bange, Hollfeld 2003, 4th corr. 2008 edition, ISBN 978-3-8044-1706-9

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Candidates for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature at nobelprize.org, January 2, 2013 (accessed April 19, 2013).
  2. ↑ Jean Anouilh: The Wild ( La sauvage )
personal data
SURNAME Anouilh, Jean
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Anouilh, Jean Marie Lucien Pierre (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer and film director
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Bordeaux , France
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 1987
Place of death Lausanne , Switzerland