Review of The Inheritor: A Play by Théâtre de l’Aquarium. Translated by Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2025. xxxvii + 55 pp.

Reviewed by Daniel Smith

The Inheritor is an important activist play about education and privilege, presenting a stylized competition between two students attempting to earn admission to a prestigious French university. The wealthy Inheritor is given every advantage, praised and coddled when underprepared, and ultimately taught to bully and oppress his working-class Non-Inheritor counterpart. The non-realistic stage world proceeds through a series of games, memories, and dream sequences, shaped by twin choruses of Students and birdlike Professors. This book provides an excellent English-language translation of the French text along with engaging editorial apparatus covering historical context and production strategies.      

Bredeson’s introductory essay grounds the project in her scholarly work on theatre and protest in Paris during the uprisings of May 1968. (Kate Bredeson, Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2018). The production history of this play is fascinating: initially performed at the École Normale Supérieure on May 3 and 4, the production pivoted to touring occupied schools because protests and the police response made it impossible to continue as planned. Théâtre de l’Aquarium began as a student group interested in collective creation and practice-based research. The Inheritor draws on documentary evidence, inspired in particular by the work of sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, whose book Les Héritiers: les étudiants et la culture was published in 1964. (Available in English translation as The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture. Trans. Richard Nice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.)

This Introduction also offers a detailed discussion of the translation process that will be of particular interest to readers of The Mercurian. Bredeson demonstrates an awareness of the collaborative nature of theatre translation, having sought out collaborators whose expertise compliments her own. Consultant Joelle Rameau offered expertise in French language and culture that led to some specific choices, while co-translator Thalia Wolff brought a perspective as a twenty-first century undergraduate student well-equipped to explore the play’s resonance with contemporary issues in U.S. higher education. Bredeson identifies a number of dramaturgical challenges for translating the culture of French higher education with its high-stakes entrance and agrégation examinations. She further discusses sensitivity toward gender, race, and religion in this translation, as well as decisions about translating slang terms and using Simon Says as an equivalent for a French children’s game. Analyzing the play’s engagement with questions of religion, and the framing of higher education as salvation, Bredeson explicates France’s policy of official secularism (laïcité) as context. A vexing stage direction about an alarm clock leads into a discussion of the play’s engagement with absurdist aesthetics and didacticism. Bredeson concludes the essay by invoking the play’s activist engagement, both in its own tumultuous historical moment and in terms of its potential for inciting conversation and change today.

A second introductory section featuring Thalia Wolff’s reflections on working as both co-translator and director offers additional fruitful context for this piece. Wolff describes decisions made regarding casting and doubling that were effective for the circumstances of a staged reading at Reed College, along with a collaborative rehearsal process in which ideas from actors were taken seriously to inform the staging. Her directorial interpretation focused on the contrast between the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, while creating a stage world featuring many strange elements. Wolff’s evocative discussion of the Bird-Professors’ flapping and perching movement might inspire similar choices from other directors who stage this script. 

The introductory materials evince a combination of careful attention to cultural and historical context with a view toward rendering a theatrically viable and resonant script for the present moment. These qualities are borne out in the translation itself, which achieves a consistent theatrical register that balances distance and proximity in productive ways. The gamified competition plays out in terms familiar to U.S. audiences: Blind Man’s Buff, the aforementioned Simon Says, and card games including poker and War. The Non-Inheritor’s befuddled participation in such games in hopes of economic advancement might resonate with contemporary audiences in relation to the television series Squid Game. But the text also preserves the specificity of French educational culture in a number of ways. A section skewering the formulaic structures of French essay writing remains easily accessible in English. Portions involving French pronunciation and pedagogical practices around reciting poetry are more complicated. Directors and dramaturgs working on this script would need to make decisions about how to pronounce names like Victor Hugo and Jules Ferry, where an Americanized pronunciation would have a different rhythm than a French pronunciation. A similar challenge arises in the scene where the Elementary School Teacher teaches vowel sounds: should the actor name the vowels in English or French?

The Inheritor has tremendous potential to incite significant dialogue in college and university communities. In a classroom setting, this play would pair very well with Luis Valdez’s No Saco Nada de la Escuela (1969), which employs similar techniques to satirize white privilege in the U.S. educational system. For a departmental production season, the large (but flexible) cast size is an important asset. Wolff offers a doubling scheme allowing for a cast of 15 to play nearly 40 roles. A fully designed production would provide excellent opportunities for student or faculty designers, particularly in the areas of costume design and sound design. I know of one staged reading organized by Jane Barnette at the University of Kansas in December 2024, and I am confident that more readings and productions of this provocative play will follow.      

Daniel Smith is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at Michigan State University. While on sabbatical, he is spending the spring 2025 semester as the Martha Daniel Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College and State University. His scholarly and creative interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French theatre, dramaturgy, adaptation, and translation studies. Dan has published articles, translations, and reviews in L’Esprit Créateur,Performing Arts Resources, The Mercurian, Translation Review, Brecht Yearbook, and Theatre Topics. He has served as editor of the journal Theatre/Practice.