PRESS:

PARIS

The nonconformist French theater since the war has been dominated by dramatists from abroad: the Irishman Samuel Beckett, the Romania Eugene Ionesco, the Russian Arthur Adamov and the Spaniard Fernando Arrabal.
The output of Beckett and Ionesco has slowed of late. Adamov committed suicide a few years ago. Arrabal, the youngest of the coterie, remains conspicuously active.
He was born in Spanish Morocco in 1932. When the Spanish civil war spread there his father was arrested and condemned to death. As no mention of him was subsequently made in the family circle, which was proFranco, the boy grew up believing his father was dead. Then he happened on a letter his father had written his mother. The elder Arrabal's sentence had been lightened, and after six years he escaped from the prison hospital. After imparting that news he was never heard of again. The family later moved to Spain and the young Arrabal studied law in Madrid.
In the early 1950s he came to Paris and married a Frenchwoman. Confined to a clinic after he contracted tuberculosis, he began writing to pass the time. Restored to health, he toured as an actor in plays by Kafka and Ionesco.
He made his debut as an author with "Piquenique en campagne" ("Picnic in the Country"), in which a soldier and his family are mowed down in a meadow. Presented in Paris in 1959, it has since been in the repertory of avant-garde theaters from Tokyo to New York.
He followed this with another shocker in his characteristic manner. "Le Cimetière des voitures" ("The Automobile Cemetery"), in which the martyrdom of Jesus Christ is pictured allegorically against the background of a contemporary usedcar dump hard by a brothel.
When Arrabal visited Madrid during Franco's reign he was arrested and charged with blasphemy and insulting the nation because of an inscription in one of his books. He was held in jail for three weeks and some newspapers recommended that he be castrated. He explained in court that the inscription had been rnisunderstood: He said he had written "patra" (the name of his favorite cat) instead of "patria" (the fatherland). The government, embarrassed by the protests against Arrabal's imprisonment and the jocular coverage the case was receiving abroad, acquitted the dramatist, who chronicled his experience in a short play, "Et ils passèrent des menottes aux fleurs" ("They Put Handcuffs on Flowers").
"Myth fascinates me," Arrabal has explained. "I believe that the primitive man's cyclical view of the cosmos is close to fundamental reality."
Illustrating his theory, he exposed the urges and anxieties that haunt the subconscious with flairing theatricality, making nightmares come true behind the footlights so that the spectator receives an uncanny shock of recognition in bizarre visions in which terror and satanic humor go hand in hand.
One of his bestknown plays is "L'Architecte et I'Empereur d'Assyrie" ("The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria"), a fantasy of metempsychosis. A monarch finds himself stranded on a desert island after an airplane crash. There he meets the only other inhabitant. The two enter into a mysterious game, first exchanging ranks and later souls.
Arrabal is as prolific as ever. Aside from 50 plays he has written several novels, directed films of his scripts, lectured and entered into literary controversies in newspapers and magazines. One of his novels, "La Piedra lluminada" ("The Compass Stone") appeared in English last year and his latest, "La Vierge rouge" ("The Red Virgin"), was published in France last summer.
He lives in a spacious apartment in Paris's 17th arrondissement. The walls of his study are covered with canvasses by young artists and in some of these he has served as a model, a figure in extravagant mythological settings.
"People suppose from my plays that I am always conducting orgies." He laughs. "Imagine ! I live quietly here with my wife and children. Of course it would be fun to have orgies and if I were a movie idol, that's probably what I would be doing. However, the fact is that my only vice is work.
"I write in Spanish and in French. I have studied English and in Toronto a few weeks ago I gave my first conference in English. It went well and no one laughed at me. Come and look at my picture collection."
We made the round of his gallery.
" Painting has always been an influence on my work. I paint myself and I've known most of the contemporary artists.
"I began writing plays for my own amusement. I never thought they could be staged. A friend convinced me that they would play. 'Prove it,' I demanded and he did. I've had a play produced in Paris almost every season since 1959."
Despite his savage satires of injustice, warfare and capitalism, he maintains that he has little interest in politics. His leftist admirers were horrified by his play prophesying the assassination of Fidel Castro, whom he pictured as a ruthless tyrant.
In "Bréviaire d'amour d'un haltérophile", an oneact play, a muscleman waiting his call to display his strength for the world championship is badgered in his dressing room by a spiteful elf posing as his dresser whose poisonous hostility so exasperates the giant that he is in danger of losing the contest. The author's drawing of the grotesque conflict, that of a lion being tormented by a flea, is in Arrabal's best smallform manner.

Arrabal has interrupted his career as a film auteur temporarily though his motion pictures have won attention and praise. Among them are "Viva la Muerte" and his filming of "Le Cimetière des voitures."
"I have said what I have to say on the screen. The medium has its advantages and its limitations. I am a movie fan, but there is for me no authentic substitute for the stage, where what happens is live and happens only once.
"The screen can do things that are beyond the technical capabilities of the stage and should I have a subject that fits only the cinema I shall make another film.
"My most recent film, ,The Odyssey of the Pacific,' was shot in Canada with Mickey Rooney as its leading character. He has a set public image but, unlike so many screen stars, instead of endlessly repeating himself, he is eager to risk change. There is a freshness to all he does.
"When the filming was completed he said to me, ,You are the finest director I've ever had,' a huge compliment as he had worked with most of the foremost directors of Hollywood. "Then he added, 'And you are the only director who is the right size, my size."