French Theatre*

France's first important dramatist was Alexandre Hardy, who appeared in Paris in 1597 and published almost three-dozen plays over a relatively short period. Though few of his plays have withstood the the test of time, Hardy was an innovator who helped bridge the gap between the French theatre of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and that of the 17th-century.

During the golden age of French drama the most popular playwright was Molière, who (like William Shakespeare) started his career as an actor. Plays such as Tartuffe, a satire on the corruption of the aristocracy, won him the enmity of both the state and the church and a ban, but are now staples of the classical repertoire. The playwrights Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, in contrast, drew their subjects from history and classical mythology. Racine's Phèdre, for instance, taken from Euripides, is a story of incest and suicide among the descendants of the Greek gods, while Corneille's tragedy Horace is derived from Livy.

Theatre in France did not really come into its own again until the postwar period of the 20th-century with the arrival of two foreigners, both proponents of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd who wrote in French. Works by Irish-born Samuel Beckett, such as En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot; 1952), are bleak and point to the meaninglessness of life but are also richly humorous. The plays of Eugene Ionesco - eg La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano; 1948) - are equally dark, satirical and ultimately compassionate.

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