This Friday, a stunning translation of The Inheritor by Théâtre de l’Aquarium will be out in the world. The book will also be featured at the ASTR conference this year taking place in Seattle, WA, November 14-17. The play grapples with equity (or the lack thereof) within the education system and reflects political conversations of its time that remain relevant today. The translators of the work, Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff, have written a rich introduction to the play, offering translating insights, context for the play, and their takes on this memorable work. Take a look below and enjoy this companion to The Inheritor!
Kate Bredeson: We’re so happy that you can soon read The Inheritor, a play by Théâtre de l’Aquarium in Paris. We’re here to give you a brief introduction to the work: a recap of the content, the historical context, and our process to situate you for the reading experience.
When my work with The Inheritor began, I was working on a book, specifically a theater history book called Occupying the Stage, about the May 1968 events in France and the role of theater during that electric time. May ‘68 was a large cultural, social, and political movement in which students and workers were uniting in protest over working conditions, student life conditions, and quality of life in general. Through mass protests, building occupations and other actions, most of France was shut down for almost a month and a half.
When I was working on this project, I was looking for plays and performances that were created in France in 1968 and the years surrounding. I was particularly invested in the ways that theater creation—how we write plays, how we direct them, where we stage them, and who sits in the audience —were mirroring larger political conversations happening in and around the 1968 events in France. Thus, I found this play, The Inheritor. It was first mentioned in a newspaper article, and then I found the play itself, written in French, in the back of a book in a bookstore. The play was written by students for students at the most elite university in Paris, the École normale supérieure (ENS). I was a student there years before and was drawn to learn more.
The student group who composed this play was called the Aquarium. That company still exists, but under a different configuration. It was called the Aquarium because it was named after the fountain in the middle of the ENS courtyard. They adapted this play from a 1964 sociology study by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture. In this book, the sociologists presented evidence that students from privileged backgrounds who had access to museums, culture, money, and parents with degrees had better outcomes in the French university system than those who came from working class backgrounds or were first generation students.
After reading this, the students at the ENS were intrigued and wanted to make a play to perform for their fellow students to help them examine the conditions under which they studied. Choosing a horizontal mode of collaboration, the students set out to make the play together. They wrote a didactic play featuring two main characters, The Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor. The two are juxtaposed in their actions as they stay up all night to prepare for a competitive entrance exam to a prestigious school. The play premiered on May 3, 1968 at the ENS. This was at the very beginning of what would come to be known as “May ‘68” or “The May Events.” Thus, a regular run of the show became impossible, and instead, the Aquarium members toured the show to striking schools in and around Paris.
When I was studying the play, I was captivated by its ending. I wanted to translate this play, and as the subject of the play is about education, access, and disparities, I wanted to do it with a student. It was then that I invited Thalia Wolff to join me.
Thalia Wolff: Reading through the French version of The Inheritor the first time, I knew that there were many students on campus who’d likely be interested in reading or performing a play like this. When Kate invited me to be involved with this project in spring of 2021, I had just changed my major from political science and philosophy to theater and comparative literature, so the play really constituted a perfect storm in terms of the various departments and communities I was involved with on campus.
Over the summer, Kate and I completed the first draft of what would eventually become the final translation. After studying translation theory and talking through the central ideas of Bourdieu and Passeron’s sociological study, I transcribed the original French copy of the script into a two column Google Doc, keeping the English translations readily available in the right column. There were some sections of the translation that one of us would take the lead on, but others where we worked collaboratively from the beginning.
KB: Throughout the process, we had lots of word choice questions, lots of discussions about rhymes and how to translate them from French to English while still holding onto the meaning. The original title of the play was L’héritier ou les étudiants pipés, which roughly translates to “the inheritor or the loaded students”, with “loaded” referring to gambling (weighted dice, stacked deck, etc.). There were questions about whether or not to keep it in France rather than move it to an Anglophone country, but ultimately, we decided to keep it in France due to its unique relationship with the French educational system. As we talked a lot about gender, race and religion in the play as well, we chose to keep all the original references as they illuminate the student culture of France in ‘60s that was antisemitic and racist, especially in relation to the ongoing colonialism. Though the two main characters are cis men, we believe that anyone can portray these roles despite how they are written.
TW: In the fall of 2021, I directed the first stage reading of The Inheritor at Reed College. The show featured fifteen student actors who rehearsed and discussed the play over a period of four hours ahead of the performance. The reading was followed by a community talkback after the play; the audience reflected that they enjoyed the combination of the absurd and surreal aesthetics with a dynamic, didactic, well-formulated political message.
The play staging and its ending feels to me like a call to action as much as it is an unmasking of the failures of higher education to promote true equity and access to opportunities. The Inheritor serves as a provocation for its producers and audiences to examine the ways in which the play’s world and its message do not end once its actions are done. The nightmare this play represents belongs to all of us, and we are all, in one way or another, collectively responsible for the creation and realization of a more equitable reality.
The Inheritor will be published and available for purchase on November 15th, 2024.
Kate Bredeson (she/her) is a theater historian, a director, a dramaturg, and a translator. She is a professor of theater at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Thalia Wolff (she/her) translated this play alongside Kate and directed the first staged reading of an English draft in fall of 2021. She is a teaching artist and director currently studying theater education and applied theater through Emerson College’s MA Program in Boston, Massachusetts.
The Inheritor
Grateful Hearts and Minds at NUP