Pêr-Jakez Helias

Pêr-Jakez Helias, baptised Pierre-Jacques Hélias, nom de plume Pierre-Jakez Hélias (1914–1995) was a Breton stage actor, journalist, author, poet, and writer for radio who worked in the French and Breton languages. For many years he directed a weekly radio programme in the Breton language and co-founded a summer festival at Quimper which became the .

Helias was born in 1914 in Pouldreuzig, Penn-ar-Bed, Brittany. He had a modest upbringing, but this included a good education.

After a career in the French Resistance during the Second World War, in 1946 Helias was appointed as director of a weekly programme in Breton on Radio Kimerc'h. Working with Pierre Trépos, he created hundreds of dialogues, many of them between two stock characters, Gwilhou Vihan and Jakez Kroc'hen. In 1948 he was the co-founder, with François Bégot and Jo Halleguen, of , a major summer festival of Breton life.

The theatre was Helias's favourite genre, as he was convinced that the Breton reality was primarily a spoken one, so that it could best be captured by drama, and much of his early work was in the form of plays and scripts for radio. His An Isild a-heul, or Yseulte seconde (1963), was a three-act tragedy based on the story of Tristan and Isolde, but with a focus on Tristan's wife rather than his lover. While written in Breton, it was published in a dual text, with a French translation on the facing page, and was broadcast on the France Culture radio station in 1965.

Helias's best-known and most often performed play is Mevel ar Gosker, or 'The Yardman of Kosker'. A mevel bras was the most important Breton farm worker, a man who might enjoy many privileges, but he was not of the landowning class and it was inconceivable in the old Brittany that he could aspire to marry into it. However, the mevel of the play, Jakez Mano, contrives by a complicated means to marry his master's daughter, God Konan. The fact that he can not only think of this but even achieve it is seen as proof that the old Brittany, in which marriages were decided by social status and by the ownership of land, is dying.

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