Quote • RANJIT BOLT • Kudos for Playwrights

“Because they’re French, writers often acquire a kudos denied our own dramatists. We don’t call Sheridan ‘maître’ but he was a major genius, in another league from Molière. Just imagine if Shakespeare had been French! We’d never hear the last of it. In Paris there’d be a Place Shakespeare and lots of monumental buildings. And what do we have? One pigeon-shat-on statue in Leicester Square…. I don’t think Beaumarchais was a towering genius – just very, very good.”

Writer and translator Ranjit Bolt, interviewed in The Guardian by Michael Billington, who had translated Pierre Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro for Tara Arts and set it in the 19th century when the Mughal Empire was on its last legs.

Originally published on R&V 30-10-06