Staging child's play in Roger Vitrac's Victor or Children in Power: Between paidia and ludus 1

For the leader of Surrealism, children's play constitutes a "magnificent field of experience" a road to the marvelous, which, in Anna Balakian's words, is "the sacred both sublime and terrifying" that opens the path to the supreme category of "surreality". In contrast to another giant of ancient Greek thought, Nanos Valaoritis argued that dialogue, rather than plotas Aristotle thoughtis the essence of drama. In Victor or Children in Power, language indeed triumphs through the mouths of two children at play, Victor and Esther, who reveal all the hypocrisy that governs the lives of their otherwise respectable bourgeois families. A frantic game conceived by some child-like interlocutor-players serves as the frame in The Round Tables. The ludic model examined in The Round Tables permeates Valaoritis's entire dramatic output, written mostly in Paris in the late 1950s. It represents an aspect of the surrealist revolution, which was an expression of vital and spiritual needs.