page_title: History of Paris (1946–2000)
section_title: Theater
hierarchical_section_title: History of Paris (1946–2000) / Art and culture / Theater
caption_attribution_description: English: Publicity photo of Marcel Marceau. Español: Foto publicitaria de Marcel Marceau.
context_page_description: At the end of the Second World War, most Parisians were living in misery. Industry was ruined, housing was in short supply, and food was rationed. The population of Paris did not return to its 1936 level until 1946, and grew to 2,850,000 by 1954, including 135,000 immigrants, mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Italy and Spain. The exodus of middle-class Parisians to the suburbs continued. The population of the city declined during the 1960s and 1970s before finally stabilizing in the 1980s.
  In the 1950s and 1960s, the city underwent a massive reconstruction, with the addition of new highways, skyscrapers, and thousands of new apartment blocks. Beginning in the 1970s, French Presidents took a personal interest leaving a legacy of new museums and buildings: President François Mitterrand had the most ambitious program of any President since Napoleon III. His Grands Travaux included the Arab World Institute, a new national library called the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand; a new opera house, the Opéra Bastille, a new Ministry of Finance, Ministère de l'Économie et des Finances, in Bercy. The Grande Arche in La Défense and the Grand Louvre, with the addition of the glass pyramid by I. M.
context_section_description: The theater world of Paris adapted successfully to the competition from motion pictures and then from television. The Comédie-Française, the oldest theater in the city, continued to be the cathedral of French classical drama, though its actors also frequently appeared in French films. The number of theaters in the city actually increased over the course of the century from forty-three in 1905 to 118 in 1990, though a large part of the new theaters were very small.  A generation of new playwrights and directors radically changed the content and style of Paris theater; prominent directors included Jean Vilar, who headed the Thèâtre national popular from 1951 to 1963, and put on successful new productions of works by T. S. Eliot. Pirandello and Molière; the actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife, Madeleine Renaud, who created the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault in 1947 and the Théâtre d'Orsay in 1974, produced French classics as well as innovative new works. The leading playwrights of the period were Eugène Ionesco, born in Romania, who revolutionized Paris theater with his 1950 play The Bald Soprano (1950); Samuel Beckett, born in Ireland, who combined irony and burlesque in Waiting for Godot (1953); and Jean Genet, who had spent time in prison, who wrote provocative plays about sex, crime and prejudice. Other popular Paris playwrights included Jean Anouilh and Armand Salacrou. Marcel Marceau achieved worldwide fame by reinventing the art of pantomime beginning at clubs in the Latin Quarter in 1947, then in major theaters; he founded a school of mime in Paris in 1958.
caption: Beginning in 1947 Marcel Marceau re-invented pantomime at left-bank night clubs
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