Roger Vitrac (1899 - 1952) is a French poet and playwright, surrealist of the first hour which produced a work iconoclast and subversive.

Attraction for the “avant-gardes”

Born with Pinsac in the Batch, Roger Vitrac arrives in 1910 to Paris. He makes his secondary studies with the Buffon college and starts to impassion himself for poetry and the theater through the reading of Lautréamont and Alfred Jarry while being subject to the influence of the symbolism.

During its military service, it meets Marcel Arland, Rene Crevel, André Dhôtel and Georges Limbour, with which it animates the Aventure review (1921 - 1922) where will be published many its parts. He takes part in the last demonstrations dadaïstes and binds friendship with André Breton in 1922. Rejoined in the Surrealist movement , he collaborates in the first numbers of the surrealist Revolution. It is by poetry that it approaches the literature: in some of its collections (Cruelties of the night, Knowledge of dead and Humorous, 1927; the Lantern black, posthumous, 1964), oneiric dimension, already, gives place to a writing engraved, baroque, driven by a desire of unexpected and scarcity whose its style will always carry the seal.

Innovative spectacles

At the sides of Antonin Artaud, it founds “to satisfy the most extreme requirements of imagination and the spirit” the theater Alfred-Jarry (1926 - 1930) which makes its opening on a representation of Belly flaring or the insane Mother (Antonin Artaud) with the theater of Grenelle. Its relationship with the surrealist ones distends and it is excluded from the group, at the same time as Antonin Artaud, at the end of the years 1920.

On the ton of the parody, even of the provocation, Roger Vitrac continues in solo his exploration of the Inconscient, working out an air work, sometimes traditional in its expression, sometimes resolutely modern but always nourished enigmas.

Thus, several of its parts, created with the theater Alfred-Jarry - as the Mysteries of the love (1927), drama with thirty-eight characters, mixture of irony and erotism, or Victor or the Children with the capacity, corrosive satire of middle-class conformism assembled to the Comedy of the Fields-Élysées in 1928 by Artaud and Vitrac itself - pass commonly for masterpieces of the surrealist theater. Starting from 1931, he becomes journalist to be able to continue to carry out its career of playwright and to better explore burlesque its worlds in dislocation.

Indeed, between intimate tragedy and light comedies, its parts are much more than of simple curiosities; they put at evil the principles of a nature and unit incompatible with the “logic” of the irrational abysses. Moreover, taking the party of the radical coexistence of cocasse and of horrible, it “takes down” quickly, on the scene of the literary History, the role of precursor of the theater of the absurd.

Hoaxes with vitriol

In the Underhand trick (1934), it stigmatizes overall science, the marriage, the army, the Religion, the work, the family, the Patrie such as the vehicle the company; the Young ladies of broad the (1938) is a drama centered on the psychological analysis. It returns to the buffoonery with the Loup-Garou (1939) or the Saber of my father (1951); but the representations follow one another without meeting real success. It is only thanks to the posthumous resumption of Victor or the Children with the capacity in a setting in scene of Jean Anouilh with the theater of Ambiguous (1962), that it obtains notoriety from the general public, this part becoming even traditional repertory.

With the risk to produce a work too often misunderstood, Roger Vitrac, true man of the metamorphoses, fascinated by the universe of childhood, knew to transgress the diktats of school, giving free course to its original personality, of a timeless freshness.

External bonds

• National celebrations - [[1999]]
• Biography of Vitrac, summary of the part '' Victor or children with the capacity ''

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