Monography profile

Book type: edited book

Published: 13. 6. 2022

Edition year: 2018

Pages: 214

Language: English

ISBN 978-80-224-1705-1 (print), ISBN 978-80-224-1705-1 (online)

Public license:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

In: Theatre as a Value-based Discourse Slovak Theatre and Contemporary European Theatre Culture: Conference Proceedings from the International Scientific Conference 5th and 6th of October 2017 Bratislava, Slovakia

L’État de siège [The State of Siege], a play by Jean-Louis Barrault and Albert Camus, is the result of a long history. In the mid-1930s, Barrault dreamed of making a show about the plague with Antonin Artaud, adapting Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which had been published in 1722. With the long internment of Artaud, the project remained on hold until 1942 during the Occupation; Barrault decided to complete the adaptation of Defoe’s book and sought a writer who would write the dialogues. Barrault first solicited Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused and suggested he should contact Camus instead. The author of Caligula asked the theatre director to wait for the publication of his novel La Peste [The Plague] which would not appear until June 1947. From that moment on, the two men collaborated closely for more than a year. On 27 October 1948, they presented L’État de siège at the Théâtre Marigny. The play, which was a resounding failure, represented the perhaps late reply of two theatre artists to the Occupation which France had suffered as well as to the European totalitarianisms which had led to the Second World War.

Pages: 47 - 61

Language: English

Edition year: 2018

Albert Camus, Jean-Louis Barrault, theatre, collaboration, totalitarianism, adaptation, the Occupation, the press

Public license:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.