Yasmina Reza

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Yasmina Reza, 2016

Yasmina Reza (born May 1, 1959 in Paris ) is a French writer . She began her artistic career as an actress , but was best known as a writer of plays , novels and screenplays. She reached a worldwide audience with her pieces Art , Three Times Life and The God of Carnage . The latter was in 2011 under the same name of Roman Polanski filmed .

Origin and family

“My life was thoroughly banal,” Reza says of himself. “I was born in Paris, went to school in Paris, studied in Paris. […] What is less banal, however, is my origin […]. ”Yasmina Reza comes from a large Jewish family . "My father was Iranian, my mother Hungarian, my grandparents are buried somewhere in America."

When asked how things are currently living with Jewish and Iranian roots, she answered in 2014 as follows: “I don't have a special Iranian streak. I have a vein to nowhere. ”On the hint that she recorded nowhere in the novel , she keeps no traces of childhood, hardly any memories, Reza specified:“ I think my parents told me about their youth, their countries, their language and have not transferred anything of their religion. At most, I've been doing favors for a few things, like music. Besides that, I can't say that I come from anywhere. ”“ I have never had a home […] and I happen to live in France now. The only home I know is the French language. "

Her father's family in particular can look back on an eventful history. As Sephardic Jews they lived in Spain until about 500 years ago, emigrated from there to Persia, at the end of the 19th century to Moscow, and finally in 1918 - during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution - to Paris. Over the centuries, under pressure to adapt, they temporarily converted, at least externally, to Catholicism or Islam , and their family name changed from Gedaliah (Hebrew) to Reza (Persian) to Rezaiov (Russian) and finally back to Reza and - for the Israeli branch of the family - to Gedaliah.

Yasmina Reza grew up in Paris, the adopted home of her grandparents - "with wonderful parents, in cultivated and prosperous conditions". Music had a special place in family life. Her mother was a violinist, her father, an engineer, played the piano. “I would certainly not call my family a family of musicians, but a family of passionate music lovers. My father used to stand in front of us children in his dressing gown and conduct Beethoven's Fifth while the recording with the Berliner Philharmoniker was on. "

She commented on the fact that she had neither learned German from her father nor how to play the violin from her mother: "I had learned to develop without parents."

Yasmina Reza lives in Paris, she has a daughter and a son.

Artistic development

After studying acting - first at the University of Paris-Nanterre , later at the Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq by Jacques Lecoq - Reza had numerous engagements on French stages in pieces by contemporary and classical authors. In 1987 she began to write herself. “I loved the theater and I loved the language, so it made sense to write for the theater”. The successes were not long in coming. Her first two pieces were awarded the prestigious French Molière theater prize. Her third, art , became a global success. It received several prizes, including international ones (including the Tony Award and the Laurence Olivier Award ) and was her breakthrough to become the world's most played contemporary playwright. With her growing fame as a playwright, there were no offers to the actress Yasmina Reza - with the exception of a rather coincidental engagement in the first Paris staging of her second major theatrical success, Drei Mal Leben .

At the end of the 1990s Reza expanded her oeuvre with scripts and prose. When asked whether she had sought greater freedom in switching to prose, she replied that it was

“[…] A bit like with life: There are a thousand possibilities, but very few of them can be realized. If you don't concentrate on certain things early enough while writing, total freedom quickly turns into distress. That's why I like guidelines, especially when it comes to prose. Sometimes in school we were given the task of making up a story with a certain number of words, a certain number of characters and a single setting - I loved that. "

That is why drama is and will remain her favorite genre.

“The modern theater is, so to speak, the pinnacle of specifications, the kingdom of concentration. You can't put 400 people on stage, you can't comment on what the characters are saying, you can't correct what they think, you have limited time. The trick is to develop the greatest possible imagination within this fixed framework. "

In connection with the cosmopolitanism of her family, Reza confessed that her only home was the French language. This also influences her creative process, what is important to her when writing. “How people talk on stage interests me more than what they talk about. It happens a lot that I use words because they sound good in a certain place, not because they are right in that particular place ”. This particular affinity for the sound of language corresponds to her appreciation for music (“I consider music to be the greatest of all arts”), but does not lead to l'art pour l'art . Her best pieces in particular are rich in content and full of conflict, her characters lively and emotional.

A connecting element of almost all of her main characters is their origin from an upper-class Jewish milieu, another is their relationship to the arts. Both point to an autobiographical background to which Reza expressly acknowledges. "I believe that you can only write really well about your own obsessions." For her, however, that does not mean describing what you have experienced, but rather exploring possibilities. “For me, writing is an exploration of the human, an exploration of the unknown. Writing allows me to live other lives. "

Chekhov's influences are often interpreted in her dramas , which Reza only allows for her first two pieces. She firmly rejects the common assignment to tabloid theater (often in Germany). This labeling is most likely to occur when the staging makes slapstick out of Reza's joke, when it is not noticed how multi-layered her pieces, how close to deadly seriousness they are.

Reza describes her relationship to laughter and happiness as follows:

“I like to laugh, but that doesn't mean that I'm happy at the moment. [...] The most witty people are always pessimists. They are also the most humorous. I've never really laughed with an optimist. [...] The task of art is to shed additional light on life and to give our rather gloomy existence a little shine. Art should put people in a dimension that is above everyday life, it should make them smarter. I doubt whether this will make people happier. "

By early morning, evening or at night (L'Aube le soir ou la nuit, 2007) she wrote a long report about Nicolas Sarkozy , whom she accompanied a year during the presidential election campaign. When asked whether the man she describes, “who triumphs politically but can hardly be happy personally”, “could not be a character from her new novel”, she replied: “Exactly […] is in Sarkozy's case something happens that I can understand. He was conveniently elected, but at the same time abandoned by his wife. During the campaign the two played a couple, but in reality his private life was very complicated while he was campaigning successfully. "

With the novel Glücklich die Glücklichen , published in 2013, Reza arrived at a “well-made prose”, according to Tilman Krause , which “purrs lively and lively in front of the reader”, but “a brief pleasure that one ... probably too quickly forgets ".

Together with Roman Polański , she wrote the script for the film adaptation of her play Der Gott des Gemetzels (2011). This earned her, among other things, the French César film award .

Plays

prose

Scripts

  • 2010: Chicas , screenplay and director
  • 2000: Lulu Kreutz's picnic (“Le Pique-Nique de Lulu Kreutz”), filmed by Reza's partner Didier Martiny with Philippe Noiret . German book edition translated by Frank Heibert and Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, ISBN 978-3-905707-18-2 .
  • 1983: Jusqu'à la nuit, 1983.

Interviews

  • Laughter as a mask of the abysmal. Conversations with Ulrike Schrimpf , Libelle, Lengwil 2004, ISBN 978-3-909081-99-8 .
  • The longing for identity is absurd , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 25, 2017, page 11 (conversation with Reza by Sandra Kegel ).

Further awards

Web links

Commons : Yasmina Reza  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c “Writing is opening up the unknown.” Yasmina Reza in conversation with Reinhard Palm. In: Program for Three Times Life . Akademietheater Vienna, 2000/2001.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k happiness is boring conversation with Yasmina Reza. In: Die Zeit , May 17, 2001, Zeit-Magazin (last accessed May 25, 2014)
  3. ↑ a b c Yasmina Reza: Love is not a guarantee for happiness , interview between the writer and Stefan Brändle, Paris, in: Der Standard daily newspaper , Vienna, 8./9. February 2014, p. 25, and website of the paper from February 7, 2014
  4. ^ Tilman Krause: Glück, what should that be , Literary World , February 8, 2014, p. 6
  5. ↑ http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendung/fazit/1882221/ Homepage Deutschlandradio Kultur, broadcast Fazit from October 2, 2012
  6. ↑ Die Welt of May 8, 2014: Kythera Prize to author Yasmina Reza , accessed on May 10, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Reza, Yasmina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, director and actress
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris