Roger Vitrac's theater has become a classic of the 20th century. There is not a season when Victor or Children in Power is not performed. But this masterpiece of surrealist theater did not come by itself, and it has been followed by many other plays that deserve the attention of amateurs.
Because his theater is essentially physical, exhibiting an eroticism heated to white heat, putting dream and life on the same level, showing their reciprocal relationships.
While the metaphysical perspective of Symbolism, for example, supposes a timeless drama, Vitrac endeavors to date and situate very precisely each of his plays in a determined historical and social context.
This is because Surrealism, according to him, is as exact a survey as possible of reality on the equivalent and complementary planes of the lived and the imaginary. The archetypes he developed from the collective background are indeed the product of a troubled era, which starts from a world war to reach a second one. But this is no reason to lament, and carnivalesque forms have not lost their rights.
This new theater, of which Vitrac is the pioneer, requires a new dramatic language. Expressing desire, it gives pride of place to automatism. But also, it attacks the language of daily relationship, emphasizing its paralogisms, its absurdities, its amphibologies, taking stereotypes literally to better dismantle them. From then on, a truth-language is established, a sketch of a truth of language on which every authentic human relationship should be founded.
In this sense, Vitrac's oneiric dramaturgy prefigures everything, contemporary theater, from Eugène Ionesco to Romain Weingarten.

H.B.

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