Personal Note

Bonjour TLM,

A brief personal message, if I may: In one of my other jobs I am a playwright and for the last five years a play I wrote about Jean Moulin and Jeanne Darc has slowly been making its way in the anglophone theatre community. It has had productions, near misses, and now, thanks to the excellent efforts of Claire Duvivier, is has a French translation.

Malheureusement, nothing in my years in the anglophone theatre world have prepared me for the singular insularity of the French theatre community. Theatre companies who perform works in English nearly always have submission info on their websites.

Theatre companies in France do not.

While this play has always found support wherever it has gone, there appears to be no way an outsider such as myself can place it before anyone in the French theatre community. In my research so far, this world may as well be a labyrinth wrapped in an M.C. Escher painting.

The title of this post links to a downloadable PDF file of the play, Les Alchimistes, in the hopes that if you are the sort of person who visits a Resistance blog such as this, then you may also be the sort who would appreciate a good play about Jean Moulin and Jeanne Darc. If so, you're the person I wrote it for. Feel free to download and enjoy.

There may also be someone among us who knows what the next appropriate steps would be for an outsider like myself to take, or of someone in the theatre community who would be interested in the material.

Either way, the years of work placed into the project by myself and others should not waste away in my laptop. It should be accessible by the people who may enjoy it. As followers of a Resistance blog and podcast, I suspect this may apply to some of you.

For those of you who for whom this is not a topic of interest, je vous présente mes excuses pour vous avoir dérangé. Part two of the Jean Moulin podcasts should be up within a month, and after that we'll be heading to Denmark to explore some of the most extraordinary escape efforts of the war.

Until then, vive la Resistance.

Sincerely,
Kensington