The Apollo Of Bellac

Here is the quintessence of Giraudoux's extraordinary imagination and style. A shy girl applying for a job at the Office of Inventions learns from a nondescript man that she can have her way with any man if she declares that he is as handsome as the nonexistent statue of the Apollo of Bellac. The play is alive with wry and trenchant observations on the comical attitudes and truths that men assume in life.

D.C. Recreation Department, city-wide division, twenty-ninth annual one-act play tournament 1957, Falls Church Community Theatre, Inc. presents "The Apollo of Bellac," adapted by Maurice Valency from the French of Jean Giraudoux, directed by Olive Smith.

Body's critical biography seeks to unlock the secrets of Giraudoux and his work, and to provide a portrait of the author and an analysis of his short stories, novels, plays, essays, and political theory.

The Drama of Fallen France examines various dramatic works written and/or produced in Paris during the four years of Nazi occupation and explains what they may have meant to their original audiences. Because of widespread financial support from the new French government at Vichy, the former French capital underwent a renaissance of theatre during this period, and both the public playhouses and the private theatres provided an amazing array of new productions and revivals. Some of the plays considered here are well known: Anouilh's Antigone, Sartre's The Flies, Claudel's The Satin Slipper. Others have remained obscure, such as Cocteau's The Typewriter, Giraudoux's The Apollo of Marsac, and Montherlant's Nobody's Son; and two—André Obey's Eight Hundred Meters and Simone Jollivet's The Princess of Ursins—have remained virtually unread since the early 1940s. In examining French culture under the Vichy regime and the Nazis, Kenneth Krauss links the politics of gender and sexuality with the more traditional political concepts of collaboration and resistance. A final chapter on Truffaut's 1980 film, The Last Métro, demonstrates how the present manages to rewrite and revision the complex and seemingly contradictory reality of the past.