المتوحشة

by Jean Anouilh, جان أنوي, يحيى سعد (Translator)

مسرحية

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, French Literature, France

211 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1965

About the author

Works, such as Antigone (1944), of French playwright Jean Anouilh juxtapose harsh reality and fantasy.

A Basque family bore Anouilh in Cérisole, a small village on the outskirts of Bordeaux. From his father, a tailor, Anouilh maintained that he inherited a dignity in conscientious craftsmanship. He may owe his artistic bent to his mother, a violinist, whose summer seasons in the casino orchestra in the nearby seaside resort of Arcachon supplemented the meager income of the family.

He attended école primaire supérieure and received his secondary education at the Collège Chaptal. Jean-Louis Barrault, a pupil at the same time and later a major director, recalls Anouilh as an intense, rather dandified figure, who hardly noticed a boy some two years younger. Anouilh enrolled as a law student in the University of Paris but after just eighteen months then found employment in the advertising industry and abandoned the course. He spoke more than once with wry approval of the lessons in the classical virtues of brevity and precision of language he learned while drafting copy.

He followed his first unsuccessful l’Hermine in 1929 with a string. He struggled through years of poverty and produced several dramas until he eventually wound as secretary to the great actor-director Louis Jouvet. He quickly discovered inability to get with this gruff man and left his company. During the Nazi occupation, Anouilh not openly took sides, but people often view his most famous publication. He criticizes collaboration with the Nazis in an allegorical manner. Mostly keeping aloof from politics, Anouilh also clashed with Charles de Gaulle in the 1950s.

In 1964, people made Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu (Becket or The Honor of God) into a successful film, starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. Edward Anhalt adapted and won an Academy Award for his screen.

Anouilh grouped on the basis of dominant tone: "black" tragedies, dominant "pink," "brilliant" combined in aristocratic environments, "jarring" with bitter humor, "costumed" historical characters feature, "baroque," and my failures.

In 1970, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca recognized him.

Reviews

[Noury · Rating 2 out of 5]

يناقش الكاتب البعد النفسي للطبقة الفقيرة ، الطبقة المزدجمة بالحقد والشر والوصولية ..ورغم ذلك فإنها تتفهم مأساة نفسها وتتعايش معها .. ولكن تظهر الأزمة حينما تحب إبنة هذه الطبقة شاب ثري من طبقة النبلاء في فرنسا.. تقد في مأساة جديدة وهى إحساسها الجامح بالدونية !!!

تتوالى أحداث المسرحية في هذا السياق وحتى النهاية والعجيب ان المؤلف لم يجد لبطلته حلا لتعويض نقصها رغم حبها .. فالحب ليس دائما الشافي من السقم بل هنا هو سبب السقم!!

مسألة نفسية خطيرة لا يفكر فيها الأغنياء بقدر ما يشعر بها الفقراء الذين لديهم من عزة النفس ما يمنعهم من مجرد مجالسة الأغنياء!!

من الاخر :: مسرحية نفسية وبطلة معقدة وطبقة ملطخة بالمآسي القذرة!

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished La Sauvage and want to update my opinions on it while it's fresh on my mind and before I started L'Invitation.

At first, I wasn't sure where this play was going. It starts with Therese and her parents, who are musicians, working at a cafe. Therese isn't very good, but she's beautiful, and most of the patrons come to see her (if not to hear her!). Early on, we find out through a conversation between Therese and her friend Jeannette that Therese has a new lover, Florent, and that he's rich. Therese assures Jeannette that she doesn't love Florent for his money. She was impressed with it at first, but she really loves him for who he is. Her parents, however, are sniveling, greedy moochers and want Therese to use her influence with Florent to help them out.

This is when I started to get an idea of where the play was going. There is an obvious conflict from the start between Therese's familial background and the new life she will have if she marries Florent. The play is heartbreaking as the conflict develops further. Florent is a happy-go-lucky rich boy. He's never had a care in the world. He has a good and loving family, and even when they say cringe-worthy things (like his sister claiming that she works and has to work yet can take three months off in the summer and a month off in the winter to go skiing, which she does for fun and sport, by the way, not because it's fashionable...), Therese herself acknowledges that they're not malicious--they genuinely don't know better. Florent has a good heart and wants to help Therese and her family. He really loves her and tries to help her through her internal struggles.

Therese's character is what impacted me the most when I read this play. She changes from a young girl in love, happy, excited, passionate, into a young woman who can't get past the change in her life and what will be expected of her as a young woman of leisure, married to a rich, talented musician. Her dialogue was my favorite aspect of the play. She expresses herself so well, and she knows who she is, what she can stand, and what she can't. At first, I felt sorry for Florent because he genuinely doesn't understand what's wrong with Therese, why she's not "heureuse." He tries to understand what she's going through, but he's also really flippant about her feelings and assures her that she'll get used to this new life in no time. It's annoying that he doesn't accept her feelings and impressions for what they are but instead tries to fix them just because he's always gotten his way.

I know this is one of Anouilh's "pieces noires," a tragedy. But I don't think it's a tragedy for a young woman to know who she is and to walk away from a life that she can't ever embrace. It's not a tragedy for anyone to prefer a real life that is difficult over a shallow life that is easy. It's not a tragedy to recognize that other people always have it good, but not all people do, and that the rich and the poor can't fault each other, but they can't always understand each other and move past their differences either. Therese is "la sauvage" in contrast to Florent, but she's not wild, she's not a savage, she's not an animal. She's intelligent and wise, she's worldly, and she's beautiful. She can't make herself be the good little housewife and forget all about what she's gone through. She can't become a woman of leisure and pretend not to know, as she says. She's "Therese pauvre" but not "pauvre Therese."

The play is sad, but more than that, it's moving. It's political and socioeconomically astute. Anouilh continues to amaze me with his poignancy, his ability to develop characters quickly to ensure that his audience connects with them and responds to them in the appropriate ways. And he's humorous--Tarde is funny. He reminds me of GBS's Doolittle--he's a man with a beautiful daughter about to make it big, he drinks, he's a mess, and he gives Therese "honte," but he's also hilarious. Anouilh knows how to write. I love his language, his use of gesture (always le haussement des épaules...it wouldn't be a French play/story without at least one shoulder shrug) and repetition, the simplicity of his stage and set directions, so what stands out in his work are the characters and their interactions with each other. Needless to say, I can't wait to start L'Invitation, and I'm so happy that I discovered Anouilh at the used bookstore through Antigone. Side note: I'm also a little nervous to read L'Invitation. What if it's not as good as La Sauvage??
*****5 stars*****
So, it wasn't as good as La Sauvage. There are similar themes regarding the rich and the poor, but it doesn't have the same depth. The characters are interesting, and the plot is okay, but the story line is confusing and difficult to follow. I don't know if it would be as difficult if I were reading it in English, but I think it would be.
There are twin brothers, Horace and Frederic, and Frederic loves Diana, but Horace (who loves her too but doesn't know it yet) doesn't want his brother to marry Diana because he knows Diana loves him and doesn't want his twin to get hurt or to make himself foolish for love. He invites an Opera dancer, Isabelle, to their chateau for a dance in hopes that Isabelle will distract Frederic and make him fall in love with her, so he can free his brother from his obsession with Diana. Okay, so far, not too bad. But then, you have the twins' cousin, Lady India (which I just realized is an anagram of Diana, so nice job with the subtleties of characterization there, Anouilh [clin d'oeil]), who is the mistress of Diana's father, Messchersman (sic), and she's in love with Messerchsman's secretary. They're having a side affair, and Patrice (male) is always worried that Mess will find out, especially because he thinks Horace has seen him and India together (he has). So, there's that, and then, Isabelle's mom was best friends with the twins' aunt's maid, and she comes to the dance with her daughter and meets up with her old best friend, and they give away Horace's secret plan by accident but mess up the details... Oh, la la. It gets messy.
In the end, the play is funny, it's interesting, and there are some great moments of depth when the characters talk about how they feel about their wealth or poverty (for instance, a great scene between Diana and Isabelle during which Diana complains about being rich, and Isabelle basically tells her, "I've wasted enough time trying to understand you--stop complaining about being rich, and get away from me before I punch you," and then, Diana doesn't, so Isabelle does). The ironic and satirical moments reveal the deeper points Anouilh includes, and I love that the play ends with fireworks. There is room for analysis--it's not "just" a comedy--but I wish more of the characters had the same depth as the twins' aunt, Lady Desmersmortes (which essentially means...of dead seas, so that's interesting), or of Messchersman, who is Jewish and from Poland and did not have money but made it big and now tries to buy people and feels completely lost when he can't, when the power of his money, which he hates, is called into question or not even allowed to enforce itself.
*****4 stars*****
No matter what critiques I may have, both plays prove that Anouilh is a talented playwright, and both plays are worth reading and pondering over (I appreciate about Anouilh's work that the more I think about it, the more I find to think about).
Collection: 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 because of how much I love Le Sauvage

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly all of Anouilh's tragedies (the pièces noires) have the same central structure. The heroine, who's a strange mixture of purity and depravity, is faced with the choice between happiness and unhappiness; the second choice often involves her dying. She invariably rejects happiness, and chooses suffering and death. Why? I once persuaded a friend to read Antigone. She gave it back to me a couple of weeks later, and I asked her what she'd thought of it. "Well," she said, "I liked it, but sometimes I just wanted to grab hold of Antigone and shake some sense into her." Indeed.

La Sauvage is a less well-known pièce noire. The heroine, Thérèse, scrapes out a living playing in a miserable little orchestra; the only reason they make any money at all is that she's young and beautiful. People pay to watch her, rather than to listen to the music. Her father, another stock Anouilh character, is an alcoholic buffoon; we meet him again in Romeo et Jeannette . Morose, uncouth Gosta, who's known her since she was a little girl, worships the ground she walks on.

She's not interested in Gosta, or at least doesn't at first appear to be. A miracle has happened; one evening, she met someone who can take her away from all this. Florent is charming, rich and talented, and he's fallen in love with her. He's proposed to Thérèse after just knowing her a few weeks, and she's accepted. Soon they'll be married, and her past life will seem like a bad dream.

Except that, this being an Anouilh play, you know that won't happen. And, sure enough, at the end she quietly leaves Florent's beautiful house, and disappears into the night with Gosta. Why does she do it? I first read the play as a teenager, and I've thought about it many times since. I still can't really explain it. She just has to.

[ناصر سليم · Rating 4 out of 5]

این کتاب رو صوتی و با این اسم خوندم:
دعوت به قصر
ایده نویسنده خیلی عالی بود و این نمایشنامه فکر کنم در سال ۱۹۶۵ نوشته شده
و فکر‌کنم به زبان انگلیسی ترجمه هم نشده باشه
با توجه به اینکه من نسخه صوتی این نمایشنامه رو تو یوتیوب شنیدم از شروع نمایشنامه خیلی لذت بردم ولی همینطور که جلو می‌رفت احساس می‌کردم که نمایشنامه دچار سانسور شده بطوریکه در انتهای کار صد درصد متوجه شدم که دچار ممیزی‌های خیلی زیادی شده و زمانی که به گودریدز اومدم و کتاب رو سرچ کردم و کامنت‌ها رو خوندم به این یقین رسیدم که دیگه نمایشنامه یا کتابی رو به صورت صوتی گوش ندم مگر اینکه یقین پیدا کنم که دچار سانسور نشده.
اگر بخوام به خود نمایشنامه ستاره بدم با توجه به کامنت‌های که خوندم 🌟🌟🌟🌟 میدم

[إسماعيل منصور · Rating 2 out of 5]

ثالث عمل مسرحي للفرنسي جان أنوي ، نرى في هذه المسرحية تريز الفتاة الفقيرة التي ترعرعت في بيئة دنيئة ترفض الزواج من فلوران الموسيقي المشهور والغني أيضا بسبب فقرها فمن عرف الشقاء يعجز عن تذوق طعم السعادة . هناك نوع من الشقاء لا يمكن محوه وهنا فى هذه المسرحية هو ذل الفقر والحاجة نجد تريز التي تعمل مع والديها في فرقة موسيقية فاشلة، وفلوران الغني موسيقي ناجح وكأن الفقر سبب في الفشل والغني هو سبب نجاح فلوران.
المسرحية عموما وكأنها صراع بين تعاسة وكبرياء الفقراء وسعادة الأغنياء .
هي الصراع بين الفقير والغني بين نفسية وكبرياء الفقير في حضور الغني.
الجدير بالذكر أن المسرحية تم تمصيرها وقدمت تحت اسم نرجس ولعبت دور البطولة سهير البابلي وحسن عابدين ورشوان توفيق.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic tale of a poor, desperate young woman who is too damaged to be loved and a rich man who is too sheltered from the quiet desperation of everyday life to understand the suffering of most people's lives.

[S.abousena · Rating 5 out of 5]

لقد قرأت لهذه القصة نسختان نسخة ملخصة و الاخرى النسخة الكاملة و فى كلتا النسختين انتابنى شعور قوى و اعجاب ببطلة القصة و بالفكرة

[Moitreyee Mitra · Rating 5 out of 5]

doesn't need my commendation!

[Thibault Jacquot-Paratte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Je peux ni dire avoir vraiment aimé ni pas aimé. J'ai trouvé que dans les deux pièces (qui sont assez similaires dans leur fond, et chez certains caractères / personnages), il y a des idées intéressantes, ou un fond d'idées vraiment intéessantes. Ensuite, je ne trouve pas forcément que ces idées ressortent si bien, ou sont si bien formulées, ou même que je sois tellement en accord avec. Il y a beaucoup de noir et blanc (riches très riches et pauvres apparemment très miséreux et gratteux, quoique fiers parfois), sans vraiment de zone grise. En soit, un manque d'humanité à quelque part, même s'il y a des efforts en psychologie assez intéressants.

Ensuite ce que je peux dire avoir apprécié, est vraiment un sens de l'humour à la fois très basic mais aussi très inattendu, par moments. Même dans La sauvage, qui est une pièce plus triste / dure, il y des moments vraiment très tordants.

Je ne peux pas vraiment dire que je recommanderais de lire ces pièces, puisqu'il y en a de bien meilleures, mais en même temps, elles ne sont pas trop mal non plus. En bref, si vous voulez les lire, vous y trouverez probablement quelque chose d'appréciable, même si ça ne sera probablement pas une grande révélation.

[Imane · Rating 4 out of 5]

« Vous me dégoûtez tous avec votre bonheur! On dirait qu’il n’y a que le bonheur sur la terre. Hé bien, oui, je veux me sauver devant lui. Hé bien, oui, moi, je ne veux pas me laisser prendre par lui toute vivante. Je veux continuer à avoir mal et à souffrir, à crier, moi! »

[Sombre Grimoire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Une lecture sans plus...
Honnêtement je m'attendais à mieux... surtout venant d'Anouilh...

[Maha Gf · Rating 4 out of 5]

هناك نوع من الشقاء لا يمكن محوه..

lإسماعيل منصورl

أنسب وصف لهذه الصغيرة.

[Ahmed Yousri ataweyya · Rating 5 out of 5]

مسرحية مهمة جداً …فيها بعد نفسي عن تأثير الفقر في البشر و كيف يترك وصمة أبدية حتى لو اغتنى الإنسان او امتلك القوة …