The great French playwright Jean Anouilh (1910-87) wrote both "pink" bittersweet comedies and "black" tragic dramas. Jean Anouilh Five Plays ― the finest English-language anthology of his works ― crackles with both his sharp wit and his icy cynicism. In Antigone , his preeminent play and exemplar of his themes and style, he creates a disturbing world in which fate may be no more than a game of role-playing. Eurydice , The Ermine , The Rehearsal , R omeo and Jeannette are the other plays included in this edition. “In Jean Anouilh there is a constant alternation between moods of brave affirmation and bitter protest; affirmation of life's primal glory, protest at what modern urban -- particularly French -- man has made of it . . . Traditional too in Anouilh is his dramatic form -- of which he is one of the few remaining masters in the theatre of our time . . . It is essentially the theatre of the mask, the theatre which is an amalgam of ballet, farce, street fair, and improvisation -- all made to serve the purpose of revealing human truth in the gravest sense. Anouilh calls some of his plays 'black' others 'pink,' but they all sparkle with the glitter of the theatre's cloak of a thousand colors.” ― Harold Clurman Jean Anouilh was born in Bordeaux in 1910. He studied law briefly at the Sorbonne and then became a copywriter for an advertising agency. In 1931 he became secretary to the actor-manager, Louis Jouvet, and his first play, The Ermine , was staged the following year. Antigone firmly established his popularity in France in 1944, and Peter Brook's 1950 production of Ring Round the Moon in Christopher Fry's translation made his name in England. His best-known plays are: Restless Heart (1934); Dinner with the Family , Traveller without Luggage (both 1937); Thieves' Carnival (1938); Léocadia (1939); Point of Departure (Eurydice) (1941); Romeo and Jeannette (1945); Medea (1946); Ardèle (1948); The Rehearsal (1950); Colombe (1951); The Waltz of the Toreadors (1952); The Lark (1953); Ornifle (1955); Poor Bitos (1956); Becket (1956); The Fighting Cock (1966); Dear Antoine (1971); The Director of the Opera (1973); Number One (1981). Twice married, he lived mainly in Switzerland for the last thirty years of his life. Anouilh died in 1987. Five Plays