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Theatres of War is the first full-length study to be devoted to the 'Committed' theatre that flourished in modern France from 1944 to the mid-1950s. During this crucial decade, authors such as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, along with other lesser-known dramatists, responded to the issues of their time by contributing a number of tense controversial plays to a distinctive genre of realist theatre. These plays dealt with the ideological, political and moral issues arising from the Second World War, the Cold War and a series of disastrous colonial wars. Theatres of War combines historical contextualisation, pointing up the political and moral debate of the theatre of the period, with detailed analysis of specific plays, making it a useful student text. All quotations are in French with English translations immediately following.

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Theatres of War is the first full-length study to be devoted to the 'Committed' theatre that flourished in modern France from 1944 to the mid-1950s. During this crucial decade, authors such as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, along with other lesser-known dramatists, responded to the issues of their time by contributing a number of tense controversial plays to a distinctive genre of realist theatre. These plays dealt with the ideological, political and moral issues arising from the Second World War, the Cold War and a series of disastrous colonial wars. Theatres of War combines historical contextualisation, pointing up the political and moral debate of the theatre of the period, with detailed analysis of specific plays, making it a useful student text. All quotations are in French with English translations immediately following.

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This play dramatises a French sailor’s protest in 1948-49 against the brutality of the French military conduct of the Indochina war. Henri Martin was imprisoned in 1950 for five years for distributing pamphlets. The struggle to get him released became the ‘Henri Martin Affair’. This play was a vital part of that struggle, and was performed all over France, usually clandestinely, often out of doors, despite Government opposition and police harassment. Audiences were large and mainly working class. Sartre referred to it as the only example of true théâtre populaire in existence. In August 1953, Henri Martin was released after serving forty months of his sentence. Fifty years after his experiences in Indochina, Henri Martin is still alive and has been consulted by the editor of this volume, as have others connected with this unique saga in French theatre. This is a volume in the series Textes littéraires/Exeter French Texts. The text, introduction and essential notes are all in French.

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'Anouilh is a poet, but not of words: he is a poet of words-acted, of scenes-set, of players-performing' Peter Brook Jean Anouilh, one of the foremost French playwrights of the twentieth century, replaced the mundane realist works of the previous era with his innovative dramas, which exploit fantasy, tragic passion, scenic poetry and cosmic leaps in time and space. Antigone, his best-known play, was performed in 1944 in Nazi-controlled Paris and provoked fierce controversy. In defying the tyrant Creon and going to her death, Antigone conveyed to Anouilh's compatriots a covert message of heroic resistance; but the author's characterisaation of Creon also seemed to exonerate Marshal Petain and his fellow collaborators. More ambivalent than his ancient model, Sophocles, Anouilh uses Greek myth to explore the disturbing moral dilemmas of our times. Commentary and notes by Ted Freeman.

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