Kate Bredeson and Thalia Wolff’s first English-language translation of the Théâtre de l’Aquarium’s 1968 activist play The Inheritor offers a stark look at inequality in elite institutions of higher education. Translated into English and first performed in the U.S. during a renewed wave of student protests across Anglophone countries, The Inheritor speaks loudly to education inequality on college and university campuses across North America and the U.K. today.

The play uses didacticism and absurdism to convey the experience of what it’s like to be at an institution of higher education and not know the many unwritten rules and behaviors which dictate campus culture. Structured around the high stakes entrance exam preparations of two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, the play explores how their life experiences leading up to university have positioned them very differently to navigate higher education. Among its ways of showcasing a world of access and privilege where there is no such thing as “good luck”, the play features a boisterous chorus of professors, who in this world are squawking birds; a beheaded knight; a picnic in the Louvre museum; and a talking record player. 

The Inheritor was a powerful success in May 1968 in France, when the student company the Théâtre de l’Aquarium performed it for striking students in and around Paris, and, recently, with students on the Reed College campus (Portland, OR), where a public staged reading was held in the fall of 2021. In their introductions to the play, professor/student team Bredeson and Wolff draw from their experiences in academia, share the history of the Aquarium’s process and premiere, and discuss what it was like to work on this play with current students.

This play will be published in Fall 2024 by Northwestern University Press.