Planchon, Roger (1931– ), French director, actor, and dramatist, whose first production, a burlesque which he mounted with his own amateur group, won a prize in Lyons in 1950. The company then turned professional and, living as a community, built their own 100-seat theatre which opened in 1952. By 1957 they had won a considerable reputation as an experimental group. Planchon was conducting investigations into various forms of stagecraft, including the Elizabethan theatre and American gangster films. Like many of his contemporaries he was strongly influenced by
Vilar; but after a meeting with
Brecht in 1954 he became the leading director of his plays in France, with translations of
Der gute Mensch von Sezuan in 1954,
Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches in 1956, and
Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg in 1962. His preoccupation with
epic theatre led him to seek a larger building, and in 1957, at the invitation of Villeurbanne, an industrial satellite-town of Lyons, he took his company to the 1,300-seat Théâtre de la Cité. There he addressed himself to factory workers and, through meetings, publications, exhibitions, and door-to-door salesmanship, created an entirely new audience. After a successful visit to Paris in 1961, the company was awarded a government subsidy, and thus became the first national theatre in the French provinces, inheriting in 1972 the name
Théâtre National Populaire after the closing of the Palais de
Chaillot. Planchon is a brilliant actor, and as D'Artagnan in his own adaptation of the elder
Dumas's Les Trois Mousquetaires was seen in 1960 in London and at the
Edinburgh Festival. As a director he abandoned the interpretations of French classics standardized by the
Comédie-Française, and in his productions of
Marivaux's La Seconde Surprise de l'amour and
Molière's George Dandin in 1959 extended the biting social satire underlying the buffoonery to include overt Marxist references. His iconoclasm culminated during the student unrest of 1968 in a
Mise en pièces et contestation de Cid, which, basing itself on Corneille's masterpiece, attacked the very foundations of French classical drama. He later applied the same methods to Shakespeare's
Henry IV, Parts One and Two. His other notable productions include
Gogol's Dead Souls, adapted by
Adamov, in 1959, and Marlowe's
Edward II, in his own adaptation, in 1960. In 1968 he committed himself wholeheartedly to an anti-Establishment declaration by the managers of most of France's subsidized playhouses. Thereafter he played a less prominent role at Villeurbanne, laying more stress on the collective nature of the company,
Chéreau being his co-director, 1972–81. He also began to write plays himself, in a style curiously closer to
naturalism than to the critical
realism of his former master Brecht; among them are
La Remise (1962),
Dans le vent (1968),
Gilles de Rais (1976), and
L'Avare (1986).
