Active as a dramatist for fully half a century, Jean Anouilh (a-noo-ee) arguably is the best known and most performed French playwright of his generation, his work often straddling (and sometimes crossing) the traditional French boundary that separates literary from commercial theater. Pessimistic in their outlook, often dazzling in their presentation, Anouilh’s plays were almost always memorable, notable for their consummate “theatricality.” Initially recognized and hailed as a “serious” playwright, Anouilh went on to disappoint many of his earliest supporters by appealing to a wider, less sophisticated audience. Anouilh’s work also frequently drew controversy because of the author’s implied conviction that his art was somehow above politics. Notwithstanding, a number of Anouilh’s plays remain in the worldwide dramatic repertory.

Jean-Marie-Lucien-Pierre Anouilh was born June 23, 1910, in Cérisole, near Bordeaux, on the Atlantic coast of France. His father was a tailor, his mother a violinist of presumably modest talent who often played in hotel and casino orchestras. Notoriously secretive about his private life, the mature Anouilh once claimed that he had “no biography” and was most pleased not to have any. It is clear in any case that Anouilh was attracted to plays and playwriting from adolescence onward. Completing his secondary education in Paris, Anouilh befriended the future director Jean-Louis Barrault, a classmate at the Collège Chaptal; after a year and a half of law school, he worked briefly as a copywriter for an advertising agency, earning extra money writing jokes for motion pictures as he attempted to write plays. In 1931 he succeeded the playwright and scenarist Georges Neveux as secretary to the eminent director Louis Jouvet, who had fostered and developed the playwriting talents of Jean Giraudoux, at the time France’s leading playwright and in many ways Anouilh’s immediate professional ancestor. It was during his brief tenure with Jouvet that Anouilh wrote The Ermine, produced early in 1932 to mixed but generally favorable reviews.

A few lesser plays followed. It was Traveller Without Luggage, written during 1936 and performed the following spring, that first established Anouilh as a major playwriting talent. Based in part upon real news stories, drawing also upon Giraudoux’s Siegfried (pr. 1928) and upon the Oedipus legend, Traveller Without Luggage proved to be an effective blend of comic and tragic elements, with a number of memorable scenes. It also continued Anouilh’s presentation of themes such as the impossibility of true love or friendship and the ironic contrast between the real and the ideal in life as it apparently must be lived. Though far from original, Anouilh’s characteristic themes escaped banality through the author’s lightness of touch, infused by an instinctive sense of theater worthy of Molière or William Shakespeare.

With the success of Thieves’ Carnival, followed by that of Dinner with the Family, two distinctly comic efforts, Anouilh proceeded to advance his own case with nontraditional classifications of his plays as they began to appear in print. In place of the traditional “tragedy” or “comedy,” Anouilh’s efforts were billed as “black” plays or “pink” plays, later to be augmented by “shining” and “secret” plays. Besides calling attention to the playwright’s professed originality, such classifications served to underscore his deep conviction, amply expressed within the plays themselves, that such concepts as tragedy and comedy were quite unthinkable in a world increasingly devoid of meaning. Accordingly, the “black” plays contain many comic moments, and the “pink” plays, although humorous, remain haunted by the author’s chronic pessimism.

Antigone , written and first performed during the Nazi occupation of Paris, brought true fame to Anouilh even as it embroiled him in extreme controversy. Like Giraudoux...