Henri Rene Lenormand

Henri René Lenormand , 1882-1951, French dramatist. His plays, Freudian in tone and theme and often heavily symbolic, include Les Ratés (1918, tr. The Failures, 1923), Time Is a Dream (1919, tr. 1923) and Man and His Phantoms (1924, tr. 1928).

Lenormand, Henri-René (1882–1951), French dramatist, who in reaction against the realism of Antoine based his own plays on Freud, all his work being marked by a vision of man as the victim of a fate determined in infancy and by the force of his own unconscious. His first play, Le Temps est un songe (1919), was produced by Pitoëff in Geneva and then Paris, and was seen in New York in 1924 (London, 1950) as Time is a Dream. Pitoëff also produced Les Ratés (1920; NY, as The Failures, 1924) and Le Mangeur des rêves (1922; London, as The Eater of Dreams, 1929). The last was seen at London's Gate Theatre, which in 1927 had given a Sunday-night performance of Simoun, usually considered Lenormand's best play, and first staged by Baty at the Théâtre Montparnasse in 1920.