Audiberti, Jacques

▪ French playwright

born March 25, 1899, Antibes, Fr.

died July 10, 1965, Paris

      poet, novelist, and, most importantly, playwright whose extravagance of language and rhythm shows the influence of Symbolism and Surrealism.

      A former clerk for the justice of the peace in Antibes, Audiberti began his writing career as a journalist, moving to Paris in 1925 to write for Le Journal and Le Petit Parisien. Later, he wrote more than 20 plays on the theme of conflicting good and evil.

      Audiberti's drama often treats the supernatural and becomes an “accepted delirium” full of vigour and rhetoric. In Quoat-Quoat (1946) a young passenger on a French ship bound for Mexico accepts death rather than loss of identity, and Le Mal court (1947; “Evil Is in the Air”), which takes place in an 18th-century fairy-tale setting, deals with innocence corrupted by experience. La Hobereaute (1956; “The Falcon”) is an attack on religion. Among Audiberti's verse collections are Race des hommes (1937; “The Race of Men”) and Des tonnes de semence (1941; “Tons of Seed”); his novels include Abraxas (1938), Carnage (1942), and Monorail (1964).

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