Henri-René Lenormand et August Strindberg ou, la cruauté du langage, le langage de la cruauté

Une vie secrète de Henri-René Lenormand est une pièce qui met remarquablement en évidence le rapport cruel entre l'homme et la femme, ainsi que l'affrontement mortel pour le pouvoir. Le « combat des cerveaux » est au coeur du déroulement et des actions du drame ; le « meurtre psychique », ultime objectif de ce rapport cruel, en est l'aboutissement fatal. Sous l'emprise d'August Strindberg, l'auteur français décrit comment à travers les mots se manifeste le combat du plus fort avec le plus faible. Dans les pièces « climatiques » de Lenormand, seul le plus fort, physiquement et psychiquement, pouvait survivre dans les conditions extrêmes des pays tropicaux. Dans le drame étudié, ce schéma s'étend à la lutte des idées, qui oppose les tenants de la morale officielle aux révoltés qui, au nom de leur liberté, n'acceptent pas les valeurs de la société.

H.-R. Lenormand during his youth already was trying his strengths as the scenic author with various results. However, after he discovered Strindberg's works (especially these of them written by Strindberg after his famous crisis described in Inferno), Lenormand had experienced glare. For the very first time, the French author got familiar with the works of the Author of Father in Switzerland, during the First World War, from which he tried to escape pretending to be sick with tuberculosis. Although Strindberg's plays were performed in German, Lenormand was intuitively convinced that he discovered the great playwright. After the First World War, Lenormand comes back to France and reads all Strindberg's works translated into English. Since that time, his own way of writing is changing dramatically. Being inspired by Strindberg's works, Lenormand in his individual way will deal with conflicts between men and women, in a truly expressionist manner. In Lenormand's plays appears his own version of the battle of the sexes, in which a woman like a praying mantis devours a male. Although it is a words' fight only, its effects are not less bloody. As in some Strindberg's plays, also in Lenormand's dramas often there is a "psychological murder".