Word: audiberti
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Died. Jacques Séraphin Audiberti, 66, leading French avant-garde playwright, novelist and poet, a surrealist who enlivened the French stage in 1946 with Quoat-Quoat, a bitter commentary on self-martyrdom, and in 19 other plays depicted the conflict of good and evil in a jarring mixture of scatological slang and 16th century classicism, in 1962 causing near riots when the most scandalous of all, The Ant in the Body, was consecrated at France's venerable Comédie-Française; of cancer; in Paris...
...Audiberti recently became a contributor to the Comédie Française, thus assuring himself of a sort of down payment on immortality. Used to stumer fare, the mink-and-diamond Comédie audience could hardly believe what they heard in Audiberti's play, The Ant in the Body...
...plot was hard enough to take: a woman enters a convent to cleanse herself of sensuality, only to end up begging a young officer to rape her. But Audiberti's attention-demanding pace, his mixing of dialect and modern slang with classical French, his erotic, violent language, his loving description of urination-all were too much. "Scandal!" the audience roared...
...episode served to prove that Audiberti has become what one critic called "a comet in the cosmos." A journalist for 20 years, he has written six books of poetry and 16 novels and essays...
Already widely produced in France, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium, Audiberti's plays are part allegory, part farce, simple confrontations of good and evil-and all of them share a torrential richness of language and sensuality of tone that have won wide critical acclaim. Says Critic Jean de Beer: "In a few years, Audiberti works will be in even the most elementary textbooks for the study of the French language." Unmoved by either condemnation or praise, the stocky, balding Audiberti roams about his country retreat in flabby corduroys and an old suede jacket, working on a new play...