The writer René de Obaldia, one of the most performed contemporary French playwrights in the world, has died at the age of 103, the French Academy, of which he was a member, announced Thursday to Agence France-Presse. member since 1999.
“The Permanent Secretary and the members of the French Academy are sad to announce the disappearance of their colleague, Mr. René de Obaldia, who died on January 27 in Paris,” the institution wrote on its website.
The circumstances of the death are not known.
Born in 1918 in Hong Kong, he was a poet and playwright, and had published shortly before reaching his 100th birthday “Perles de vie” (Grasset editions), where he noted the proverb: “To become a centenarian, you have to start young”. .
Son of a Frenchwoman and a Panamanian, a diplomat in the Chinese city under British control, he did not know his father, whom his mother quickly left after his birth to return to France.
He grew up in Amiens, in his mother’s region, then in Paris, where he demonstrated his literary skills very early on.
A prisoner during the Second World War, interned for four years in a camp in Silesia from which he was repatriated as seriously ill, he then became a jack-of-all-trades writer, with a biting humour, cultivating detachment. His crazy, unclassifiable work translates the ridiculous and tragic feeling of life.
During his acceptance speech at the Academy in 2000, he admitted “often out of step with reality; a reality for which, I must confess, I harbor a strong suspicion”.
By calling himself “Monsieur le Comte” in some of his writings, he ironically assumed a prestigious Latin American lineage, even though he had no contact with that side of his family.
“This derisory side”
“I have always had this derisory side in me, which allowed me to put certain things at a distance”, he declared to L’Express in 2009.
In 1959, for example, he published “Le Centenaire”, a long romantic monologue by an old man (not even a centenarian) who dwells on a multitude of memories.
But it is with his theater that this robust man with a receding hairline, seducer, crafty, elusive, knows success. He was one of the great playwrights of the 1960s and 1970s and then participated, with Beckett and Ionesco, in the revival of French theater led by the Théâtre National Populaire (TNP). His work has earned him worldwide fame, with pieces such as “Du vent dans les branches de sassafras”, “Monsieur Klebs et Rozalie” or “La Rue Obaldia”.
Politically, he became involved in 1978 against the communist bloc during the creation of the Committee of Intellectuals for Europe of Freedoms, alongside other writers, artists and intellectuals, behind the philosopher Raymond Aron. But he remained discreet about his opinions.
In his introduction to “Perles de vie”, he congratulated himself on an “existence rich in metamorphoses: poems, novels, theatre, memoirs”.
He then made a television appearance on the show La Grande Librairie, always with a sharp mind. With old age, he joked, “we can do stupid things, and we are excused everything because we say: he is completely doddering”.
The death of René de Obaldia leaves vacant six of the 40 seats at the French Academy. One of them must be filled in an election scheduled for February 17.
The Academy, which elected Mario Vargas Llosa, 85, to its ranks in November, when this Peruvian-Spanish writer had exceeded the age limit by ten years, is having notorious difficulty in allocating these seats, for lack of valuable candidates. .