Vinaver, Michel 1927–

(Michel Grindberg)

PERSONAL: Born Michel Grinberg, 1927, in Paris, France; married; children: four. Education: Wesleyan University, B.A., 1947; Sorbonne, licence libre de lettres, 1951.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Methuen Publishing Ltd., 11-12 Buckingham Gate, London SW1E 6LB, England.

CAREER: Gillette (corporation), France, member of staff, 1953–60, Belgium, managing director, 1960–64, Italy, CEO, 1964–80, DuPont (division of Gillette), France, CEO, 1969–80; Institute of Theatrical Studies, Paris, France, associate professor, 1982; Centre National des Lettres Drama Committee, founder, 1982, chair, 1983; Université de Paris, professor of theater studies, 1988. Military service: Served in the French army.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fénéon prize, 1952, for L'objecteur; Ibsen pize, 1986, for Théâtre complet; Kleist prize, 1986, for Les Voisins.

WRITINGS:

SUBHEAD

Lataume; ou, la vie quotidienne (novel; title means "Everyday Life"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1950.

L'objecteur (novel; title means "The Objector"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1951, published as L'objecteur: pièce en deux actes, L'Arche (Paris, France), 2001.

(Translator) Henry Green, Amour (title means "Love"), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1954.

Les Coréens (play; title means "The Koreans"; produced as Aujourd'hui; ou, les Coréens, Lyons, France, 1956), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1956, reprinted, Actes Sud (Arles, France), 1993.

Les huissiers, comédie (play; title means "The Bailiffs"; produced 1958, revised version produced in Lyons, France, 1980), revised version published as Le livre des huissiers, Limage/Avila (Paris, France), 1981.

La Fête du cordonnier (play; title means "The Shoemaker's Holiday"; adaptation of a play by Thomas Dekker), produced in Paris, France, 1959.

Par-dessus bord: pièce en six mouvements (play; title means "Overboard"; produced in 1970), L'Arche (Paris, France), 1972.

La demande d'emploi: pièce en trente morceaux (play; title means "The Interview: Piece in Thirty Parts"; produced at the Avignon Festival, 1972; produced as Situation Vacant in Surrey, England, 1989), L'Arche (Paris, France), 1973.

Iphigénie Hotel: piece in 3 journées (play; adaptation of a novel by Henry Green; produced in Paris, France, 1977), Gallimard (Paris, France), 1963, reprinted, Actes Sud (Arles, France), 1993.

Théâtre de chambre (plays; title means "Chamber Theater"; includes Dissident, il va sans dire, Nina, c'est autre chose, and Vers un théâtre minimal, by Jean-Pierre Sarrazac; produced in Paris, France, 1978), L'Arche (Paris, France), 1978, translation published as Dissident, It Goes Without Saying, in Drama Contemporary: France, edited by Philippa Wehle, Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986, reprint including Dissident, il va sans dire, Les travaux et les jours, and Les voisins, edited and with an introduction by David Bradby, Focus Information Group, 1995.

Les travaux et les jours: pièce en neuf morceaux (play; title means "Work and Days"), produced in Paris, France, 1980; produced as A Smile on the End of the Line in Richmond, Surrey, England, 1987, produced as Blending In in Edinburgh, Scotland, 1989), L'Arche (Paris, France), 1979.

Les histoires de Rosalie (children's stories; title means "The Stories of Rosalie"), Flammarion (Paris, France), 1980.

À la reverse: pièce en deux morceaux (play; title means "Backwards"; produced in Paris, France, 1980), L'Aire (Lausanne, Switzerland), 1980.

Écrits sur le théâtre (essays; title means "Writing on the Theater"), edited by Michelle Henry, L'Aire (Lausanne, Switzerland), 1982.

Lapiaz: anatomie d'un paysage (landscape photography), Passage (Paris, France), 1982.

L'ordinaire: pièce en sept morceaux (play; produced in Paris, France, 1983), L'Aire (Lausanne, Switzerland), 1983.

Le compte rendu d'Avignon: des mille maux don't souffre l'edition théâtrale et des trente-sept remèdes pour l'en soulager (criticism), Actes Sud (Arles, France), 1987.

Le dernier sursaut: impromptu, Actes Sud (Paris, France), 1990.

(Translator) William Shakespeare, Jules César, 1990.

L'emission de television: comédie (play; title means "The Televison Program," produced in Paris, France, 1990), Actes Sud (Arles, France), 1990.

Ecritures dramatiques: essais d'analyse de textes de théâtre (criticism), Actes Sud (Arles, France), 1993.

Vinaver Plays, two volumes, edited by David Bradby, Methuen (London, England), 1997.

Écrits sur le théâtre (essays), L'Arche (Paris, France), 1998.

King; suivi de Les huissiers (plays; produced in Paris, France, 1999), Actes Sud (Arles, France), 1998.

(Editor) Répliques, Actes Sud (Arles, France), 1999.

(Editor) Écritures dramatiques: essais d'analyse de textes de théâtre (essays), Actes Sud (Arles, France), 2000.

La visite du chancelier autrichien en Suisse (travel), 2000.

Théâtre complet (collection of plays), eight volumes, Actes Sud (Arles, France), 2002–05.

11 septembre 2001 (play; French and English), L'Arche (Paris, France), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: As one of France's leading playwrights, Michel Vinaver's work is often assigned to the Theater of the Quotidian (Webster's—"something that occurs each day"), with Rainer Fassbinder and others. Still, as Gideon Lester wrote in a Theater article, the author is hard to pin down: "His dramaturgy owes more to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the late string quartets of Beethoven than to the theories of Brecht and Artaud, while thematically his plays explore a territory hitherto unknown to any stage: the sphere of corporate life." Vinaver is also known for his use of ancient Greek dramatic techniques, Shakespearean themes, unpunctuated dialog, musical rhythm, and composition in his writing, along with the juxtaposition of ironically jarring language, scenes, and time frames in his presentation of the everyday lives of ordinary people confronted with fragmentation in modern society. As Yvonne Y. Hsieh wrote in French Review, a play by Vinaver "reads practically like a novel."

Born to a well-to-do Russian immigrant family that had fled the revolution in 1920, Vinaver grew up in Paris until the Nazis entered France. His family moved first to the Free Zone in the south and then to New York, and Vinaver returned to France at war's end. After a year in the Free French Army (an experience he documented in his novel L'objecteur), he returned to the United States, where he earned a B.A. in English and American literature at Wesleyan University. It was at Wesleyan that he first encountered T.S. Eliot's poetry, which was to have a deep and lasting effect on him. Lester quoted him as saying, "Discovered The Waste Land. Big bang…. As far as my writing for the theater is concerned … the encounter with The Waste Land was … formative. Much more than an influence. For a long time I remained unaware that The Waste Land lived within me. More exactly, I live within it. It is my house."

Eliot, along with James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, and many others, was a modernist. Although Vinaver did not write his first play until 1955, he was called the "first truly modernist" playwright in a Modern Language Review commentary by David Bradby, editor of several volumes of Vinaver's work. Other critics have also commented on Vinaver's use of techniques common to writers and artists from earlier in the century. Many used montage (a patchwork of different points of view, as in cubism, illogical and discontinuous dialogue, different genres, time and person switches, and references to other works), experiments with punctuation and language, and particularly a focus on how changes in context produce different relationships between people and things.

The workings of the business world constitute a subject Vinaver can write about from personal experience. Finding he could not earn a living as a writer, in 1956 he put an ad in the New York Herald Tribune and landed a job with Gillette. He worked with that company for nearly three decades, becoming CEO in the 1960s. His business experience was the basis for several of his plays, which are not directly about himself. As he wrote in Theater, they portray "how the System functions, how it … throws its agents 'pardessus bord' [overboard], or lets them tumble 'à la renverse' [backward], or consumes them to facilitate its 'ordinaire' [normal order of things]." Each of these is the title of a Vinaver play.

Vinaver does not set out to shock audiences brutally into awareness. Rather he aims for a more subtle awakening. He wants, as he says, according to Bradby, to "thrust towards meaning" in a world he sees emptied of it by a consumerist focus on success at work, competition, advertising, or economics rather than human relationships. He often does this by presenting ordinary, everyday occurrences in such a way that their strangeness and alienation becomes clear. (Audience members have complained about coming to the theater only to experience what happens to them all day at work—telephones ringing, superficial conversations, a barrage of unconnected, jarring, sometimes just boring events.) Or he presents strange events—like the cannibalism by a group of airplane crash survivors, soldiers' actions during a war, or a young woman's murder of her businessman lover—to show how they participate in what is currently "normal." He explains what he wishes to do, noted Bradby in a New Theatre Quarterly article, as presenting "daily existence before it has been fed through social, psychological, or ideological explanations" to give the audience "ordinary" experiences as though through the eyes of a child.

Vinaver's first play, Les Coréens, ("The Koreans") deals with the fear of physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering shared by Korean villagers and a group of French U.N. soldiers. It is an anti-war play. Les huissiers, comédie and Iphigénie Hotel: piece in 3 journées both present aspects of daily life during the Algerian war of independence. In 1967 Vinaver began the five-year process of writing Par-dessus bord, a long play in six acts about the impending takeover of a French toilet-paper company by an American conglomerate. Since then he has written about such subjects as what unemployment does to ordinary people, how television manipulates our understanding of events, the cosmetics industry and advertising, and the justice system. As a professor at the University of Paris, he continued to write plays that undermine our acceptance of a world that cannibalizes people. Recent work includes 11 septembre 2001, a play that was inspired by the events of 9/11. Vinaver's essays have been collected, and his plays have been published in an eight-volume collection.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bradby, David, Modern French Drama 1940–1980, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1984, revised and published as Modern French Drama 1940–1990, 1991.

Bradby, David, The Theater of Michel Vinaver, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1992.

Contemporary World Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

Elstob, Kevin, The Plays of Michel Vinaver: Political Theater in France, Lang (New York, NY), 1992.

International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 2: Playwrights, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

Myth and Its Making in the French Theatre, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Ubersfeld, Anne, Vinaver dramaturge, Librairie Theatrale (Paris, France), 1989.

PERIODICALS

French Review, February, 2002, Yvonne Y. Hsieh, review of Par-dessus bord: pièce en six mouvements, pp. 489-499.

Modern Language Review, October, 1983, David Bradby, review of Écrits sur le théâtre, pp. 937-938.

New Theater Quarterly, August, 1991, David Bradby, "A Theatre of the Everyday: The Plays of Michel Vinaver," pp. 261-283.

Theater, spring, 1997, Gideon Lester, "Industrial Art: The Theater of Michel Vinaver," pp. 69-73; spring, 1997, Vinaver, "A Reflection on My Works," pp. 74-78.