L’Arrestation

A new play in the “secrètes” cycle, staged at the Théâtre de l’Athénée on September 20, 1975. Behind the veneer of a detective mystery, Anouilh stages a theater of confession and manipulation. “L’Arrestation reads like a patchwork of his earlier plays: Le Voyageur sans bagages, L’Orchestre, Léocadia, etc. His favorite characters reappear, along with his fascinated contempt for the ugliness and vulgarity of the bourgeois and the down-and-out, and his longing for purity, for a time before the sin of growing old. L’Arrestation is the imaginary revenge of the child who would kill the adults instead of letting himself be killed by them.” (Le Monde, 19 September 1975).