The World of Jean Anouilh

The World of Jean Anouilh by Leonard Cabell Pronko presents the French dramatist as one of the twentieth century’s most incisive playwrights, a writer whose enduring reputation rests on his exploration of moral compromise, political expediency, and the tension between purity and complicity. While Anouilh’s later works after 1960 tended toward whimsy or self-conscious mannerism, his major contributions remain the serious dramas of the 1940s and the bitter comedies of the postwar decade—*Antigone*, *Ardèle*, *L’Alouette*, and the late triumph *Becket*. These plays established him not as a boulevard entertainer but as a poet of the “dirty hands” dilemma: whether to plunge into the sordid world of politics and power, as Creon does, or to refuse altogether, like Antigone or Hugo, and risk irrelevance. Pronko situates Anouilh’s achievement in a broader cultural and theatrical frame. U.S. audiences initially resisted his bleak vision and the French conventions of *ménage à trois* and anti-realist staging, but Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, alongside the theater of the absurd, created receptive spaces. Antigone, staged during the German Occupation, became a touchstone for audiences who read in it the conflict between collaboration and resistance, even if the playwright disavowed explicit politics. Becket confirmed Anouilh’s capacity for depth after lighter boulevard pieces, while the late plays repeatedly stage upstairs/downstairs contrasts between perfumed salons and grim kitchens, dramatizing class and moral divides. Throughout, Anouilh maintained that he sought only to entertain, yet the ethical gravitas of his work, its recurring dialectic of purity and compromise, belies this modest claim. For theater practitioners and scholars alike, Pronko’s study underscores why Anouilh’s core works—above all Antigone, Becket, and La Valse des toréadors—remain essential to modern repertoires. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.