Tennessee Williams’s Le Paradis sur terre (Kingdom of Earth) at the Festival d’Avignon, July 1985: A Review of the Reviews

Abstract

Tennessee Williams’s late play Kingdom of Earth received its French premiere in 1985 during  the Parisian ‘Printemps du théâtre’ or Spring Theatre Festival competition, for which its director, Élisabeth Chailloux, won first prize. The award guaranteed the play three performances at the famed Festival d’Avignon, before touring the rest of the country. That Chailloux chose to overlook Williams’s classics and stage one of his late plays is significant in itself, given that, at home at the time, Williams’s late plays rarely received positive reviews from the New York theatre critics. In the theatre archives at the Maison Jean Vilar in Avignon is a folder containing newspaper clippings from the Parisian and provincial French press about the Chailloux production. Read individually, these theatre reviews offer a glimpse into how his work was being received in France a few years after his death; read collectively, the reviews provide a rare panorama of the general critical reception of US theatre at the time with respect to European theatrical productions.