Yasmina Reza

Yasmina Reza (1959- ), French dramatist and actress, whose brisk, witty plays combining sharp satire and light philosophical insights have made her one of the most performed playwrights in Europe.

Reza was born in Paris, to Jewish parents; her father was a Russian-born Persian engineer and her mother a Hungarian violinist. She studied sociology at the Université Paris X-Nanterre and drama at the École Jacques Lecoq. Her early stage roles included plays by Molière, Marivaux, and Sacha Guitry.

Her first success as a writer came in 1987 when her play about the relationship between sex and death, Conversations Après un Enterrement (Conversations After a Burial), in which a man and a woman make love on a dead man’s grave, won several prizes including France’s prestigious Molière Award. La Traversée de l'Hiver (1990; Winter Crossing) brought further recognition, but it was her third play that made her internationally famous.

Art, which dissects the lives of three male friends who fall out when one of them spends a small fortune on a blank white modernist painting, premiered in Paris in 1994, was subsequently translated into 35 languages, and won Molière and Tony awards for its French and Broadway productions. The play also became a long-running success in London’s West End, opening in 1996 with a cast of Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and Ken Stott, and winning the Olivier for Best Comedy. Her next work, L'Homme de Hazard (1995; The Unexpected Man), was a more experimental affair, juxtaposing two musing strangers on a train from Paris to Frankfurt.

In 2000 Reza returned to the stage for the first time in a decade to appear in the world premiere of her new play, Trois Versions de la Vie (Life x 3), at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris. The play presents three subtly different versions of a dinner party hosted by an astrophysicist and his wife, to suggest that people’s everyday actions are as unknowable as the black holes of the universe.

Reza has also written two novels, Hammerklavier (1997), prompted by the death of her father, and Une Désolation (1999).