There are in all fifteen Giraudoux. plays, two of which - The
Madwoman of Chaillot and Duel of Angels - were produced
posthumously - the first in 1945, the second in 1953. Giraudoux
died on 31 January 1944 at the age of sixty-two. In Paris today
a public school and a street bear his name.

With only one exception Giraudoux's plays have won un-
qualified success in Paris. For the most part they have been
admired both in England and America and generally have
proved "good box office". They are repeatedly performed and
applauded in virtually every country of western Europe. Yet
they are not "easy", not, in the ordinary sense of the word,
popular plays. There has always been a certain ambiguity, if
not indeed some resistance, in the public and critical reception
of Giraudoux's work. It is interesting to inquire into the reasons
for this.

Jean Anouilh once told the author of this introduction that
it was his experience watching rehearsals of Giraudoux's plays
( Anouilh had been secretary and man-of-all-work for Louis
Jouvet) that gave him the clue to the direction his own writing
for the theatre was to take. To the theatrical novice in the Paris
of the late '20s, Giraudoux was a reminder that writing for the
stage need not be a mechanical game of frivolous showmanship
but a creative act, poetry. At this point of his "confession"
Anouilh burst into an accurate and not unimpressive recitation
of the most eloquent passages of The Trojan War Will Not Take
Place (Tiger at the Gates). What Giraudoux had recalled to
Anouilh was the true tradition of the theatre which had been
abandoned and corrupted by the Boulevard Theatre.

When a Frenchman speaks of poetry in the theatre, his point
of reference is not Shakespeare but the neo-classic theatre of
Racine. Its vein is more formal and less romantic-realist than
that of the great Elizabethans. The neo-classic French theatre
is a theatre of art or, if you will, a theatre of exalted artifice in
which life is fashioned, corrected and patterned after models of
ancient and noble lineage.

To this tradition Giraudoux brought a touch of modern
scepticism and irony, a trace of anguish often daubed with the

-viii-