Another Victor Hugo?

Few Americans have ever heard of Jacques Seraphin Audiberti, but in Europe his fame is that of a Tennessee Williams or an Arthur Miller. At 63, Audiberti is considered by some critics to be France's best postwar playwright and a prime candidate for the Academic Franc,aise. He is also turning out to be somewhat controversial for a man who claims that he is "very bourgeois" and "not at all avant-garde." Last week Audiberti was in seclusion at a country house 60 miles outside Paris after one of his plays had shocked old-line Paris society down to the roots of its coiffed blue hair--and set a swarm of reporters on his heels.

Audiberti recently became a contributor to the Comedie Franc,aise, thus assuring himself of a sort of down payment on immortality. Used to stumer fare, the mink-and-diamond Comedie audience could hardly believe what they heard in Audiberti's play, The Ant in the Body.

The plot was hard enough to take: a woman enters a convent to cleanse herself of sensuality, only to end up begging a young officer to rape her. But Audiberti's attention-demanding pace, his mixing of dialect and modern slang with classical French, his erotic, violent language, his loving description of urination--all were too much. "Scandal!" the audience roared.

The play ended in a near riot, with actors and audience berating each other.

The Comedie Franc,aise insisted on keeping the play on its program, and audiences since then have calmed down.

But the episode served to prove that Audiberti has become what one critic called "a comet in the cosmos." A journalist for 20 years, he has written six books of poetry and 16 novels and essays.

He broke into national view in 1946 with his first play. Quoat-Quoat, a story of the individual's search for fatality. Since then, he has written 19 more plays, the best known of which, Le Mal Court, may soon be produced in the U.S. as either a straight play or a musical.

Already widely produced in France, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium, Audiberti's plays are part allegory, part farce, simple confrontations of good and evil--and all of them share a torrential richness of language and sensuality of tone that have won wide critical acclaim. Says Critic Jean de Beer: "In a few years, Audiberti works will be in even the most elementary textbooks for the study of the French language." Unmoved by either condemnation or praise, the stocky, balding Audiberti roams about his country retreat in flabby corduroys and an old suede jacket, working on a new play (La Brigitta) for Actress Franc,oise Spira. "Very difficult, very difficult," says Audiberti to a visitor. "In fact, I think you're sitting on it. It's the story of a successful woman of 30 who comes in contact with herself--a thin, poor, timid girl of 20. What does she do? Naturally, she has to kill the other girl or else her whole life would be only an illusion." Some other views, from the same interview, of the man who considers himself another Victor Hugo :

sb ON AMERICANS. "Are Americans human beings? What I mean is, are they members of the human race in terms of what we usually mean by the words? Every time I see an American, I wonder if he is trying to be a complete nonconformist or trying on the contrary to conform to something unknown to me."

sb ON RELIGION. "Protestants are just sort of Christianized Jews, aren't they? Whereas Catholics keep up a permanent dialogue with a whole group of phantoms. Catholics are continually gaining and losing heaven, but they always have a chance to recoup themselves."

sb ON FRENCHMEN. "We have a tendency to place ourselves as absolute criteria in the center of the universe and see anyone else as a departure from the normal. But, what is a Frenchman? A being with an ingrained sense of discomfort, mocking individualism, contemptuous, revolting against any incorporation into the mass."

sb ON THE ACADEMIE FRANC,AISE. "As I see it now, I wouldn't want to belong. I think the last crop they let in is just not up to standard. There are others on the outside worth more than many on the inside--Andre Breton, Paulhan, Levi-Strauss, Sartre if he weren't such an idiot, such a strange, bizarre monster."

sb ON PRESIDENT KENNEDY. "I asked my oculist if Kennedy was always covering his eyes to protect himself from flashbulbs, but my oculist said he thought Kennedy was probably just bored. Your President is very young and looks charming."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.