In the following excerpt, Heiney examines a number of Anouilh's plays, assessing the playwright's facility with the tragedy genre.

Jean Anouilh (b. 1910) is often considered the leading French dramatist of the postwar generation, even though his reputation is only a dozen or so years old. It was under the peculiar conditions of the Occupation that his drama first attracted widespread public attention; Antigone (1942) was interpreted, as it was probably intended, as a thinly-veiled allegory of France under the Vichy regime. In America, where his work has been available since 1945, he is still relatively little known. Antigone is occasionally played in this country; Ring Around the Moon. Christopher Fry's adaptation of I'Invitation au chateau, has attracted some attention, and an adaptation ofEurydice has been presented to Broadway audiences under the title A Legend of Lovers. But the leitmotif of Anouilh's work is not widely understood; he is typically...