ABSTRACT
After a spell writing his first novel, The Flight on Horseback Far into the Town (La Fuite à cheval très loin dans la ville)—the 1970s were notoriously difficult times for playwrightsKoltès returned to the theatre, writing Sallinger and his dramatic monologue, The Night Just Before the Forests (La Nuit juste avant les forêts), performed in 1977. Travels in South America and Africa incited a particular interest in the plight of the oppressed-Struggle of the Dogs and the Black (Combat de nègre et de chiens) was one of the results of this. By now, Patrice Chéreau (whom Koltès admired greatly) was directing most of his work, and Chéreau directed all but one of his plays during Koltès’s lifetime. This certainly helped to promote Koltès’s career, but perhaps prevented him being performed as often as he might have been in France, for fear of comparison: abroad, his work was more regularly staged. Koltès continued to work on famous Chéreau productions at Nanterre during the 1980s, including Genet’s The Screens (Les Paravents) in 1983, and his translation of A Winter’s Tale. In the last year of his life, Koltès also wrote the figuratively autobiographical, anarchic (yet emotive) Roberta
Zucco as a response to the incarceration imposed by his illness.
