Roger Vitrac

Roger Vitrac (French: [vitʁak]; 17 November 1899 – 22 January 1952) was a French surrealist playwright and poet.

Born in Pinsac, Roger Vitrac moved to Paris in 1910. As a young man, he was influenced by symbolism and the writings of Lautréamont and Alfred Jarry, and he developed a passion for theatre and poetry. A year after his baccalauréat, he published a collection of poems, Le Faune noir.

During his three-year-long military service, he met Marcel Arland, François Baron, Georges Limbour and René Crevel, who together founded the literary revue, Aventure. Through the group, Vitrac met André Breton and Louis Aragon at Café Certa in 1921, where many Dada activities took place until it became one of the surrealist group's headquarters. In the early twenties, Vitrac joined the surrealist movement and contributed to the first few editions of La Révolution Surréaliste. Slowly segregated from the group along with Antonin Artaud, together they created the Théatre Alfred-Jarry in 1926, where they produced some of their most important plays such as The Mysteries of Love (Les Mystères de l'amour, 1927) and Victor, or Power to the Children (Victor ou les enfants au pouvoir, 1928), setting the tone for the Theatre of the Absurd, twenty years before Ionesco. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes The Mysteries of Love as a masterpiece of surrealist theatre. It is now considered a key play in 20th-century French theatre.

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