Fernando Arrabal

Fernando Arrabal (born August 11, 1932, Melilla, Spanish Morocco [now in Spain]) is a Spanish-born French absurdist playwright, novelist, and filmmaker. Arrabal’s dramatic and fictional world is often violent, cruel, and pornographic.

Arrabal worked as a clerk in a paper company, then studied law at the University of Madrid. He turned to writing in the early 1950s, and in 1955 he went to study drama in Paris, where he remained. The first volume of his plays was published in 1958, and the 1959 production of Pique-nique en campagne (Picnic on the Battlefield), an antiwar satire that contrasts the horrors of war with a cheerful family outing, brought him to the attention of the French avant-garde. Arrabal’s most important play of this early period is probably Le Cimetière des voitures (1st perf. 1966; Automobile Graveyard), a parody of the Christ story. The characters in his plays are frequently childlike but seldom innocent; they are prostitutes, murderers, and torturers.

After the mid-1960s, Arrabal’s plays became increasingly formal and ritualistic, evolving into what Arrabal called Théâtre Panique (“Panic Theatre”). Among the plays of this highly productive period were L’Architecte et l’empereur d’Assyrie (1967; The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria), in which the two characters assume each other’s personae, and Et ils passèrent des menottes aux fleurs (1969; And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers), more overtly political than his previous plays; its theme of freedom from oppression was inspired by the author’s imprisonment while on a journey to Spain in 1967.

In 1959 Arrabal published Baal Babylone (Baal Babylon), the first of a number of novels. It dealt with his nightmarish childhood in fascist Spain, and in 1970 he adapted it into the screenplay Viva la Muerte (Long Live Death), which he also directed. Later films included L’arbre de Guernica (1975; The Tree of Guernica) and the TV movie Adieu, Babylone! (1993; Farewell, Babylon!). An extremely prolific writer, Arrabal also produced numerous volumes of collected theatre pieces and wrote poetry as well as political and other nonfictional texts. In addition, he published books on chess.