Clare Finburgh Delijani’s chapter accounts for a significant and growing strain of theatre that stages the central role played by migration and transnational, mobile identities not just in France but also across the world. Today around 30 per cent of France’s population comprises either migrants from its former colonies or their postmigrant descendants, demonstrating the key significance of migration to French society and culture. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of ‘relation identity’, which expresses ‘the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures’, Finburgh Delijani demonstrates how the exiles, immigrants and refugees featuring in the plays she examines represent the postcolonial diversity of the French nation. With close analysis of Bernard-Marie Koltès’s Le Retour au desert (Return to the Desert, 1988), Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies (Scorched, 2003) and Estelle Savasta’s Traversée (Going Through, 2019), Finburgh Delijani exposes how characters illustrate the uprooting of belonging, legitimacy and identity by the often violent severance of migration and exile. However, the trauma that characters suffer – which cannot be underestimated – is counterbalanced by the relational, transnational and cosmopolitan citizens they are able to become.

Theatre in France has a history stretching back a thousand years. It is as wide ranging as it is old. The Introduction outlines three dominant features of this long, venerated, varied tradition: its enduring popularity; its relationship with state and nation; its international influence. The Introduction’s historical overview affords a glimpse of the near dizzying array of forms that theatre in France has taken: mysteries, passions, miracles and moralities; storytelling, juggling and other fairground performance; farces and comedy; neoclassical tragedy; nineteenth-century vaudeville, melodrama and féerie; naturalist drama; avant-garde performance; sound poetry; art installation are introduced here and treated in detail across the book’s chapters. If French theatre is characterized by its tremendous quantity and variety, it is also defined by its relationship to the state. No other art in France has been so inextricably intertwined with the nation, and with those who govern it. French authorities have recognized theatre’s public status and have therefore supported, supervised and sanctioned it, as the Introduction details. Finally, France unites northern and southern Europe, also acting as a bridge between the European continent and Africa via the Mediterranean; and with its Atlantic coast France looks out towards North and South America. For a millennium, theatre has been central to cultural life in France and has been a significant French export.