Who wrote the surrealist play 'The Breasts of Tiresias'?

Guillaume Apollinaire wrote the surrealist play The Breasts of Tiresias.

Apollinaire wrote the play in 1903, but its revised version first appeared onstage in Paris in 1917 under the subtitle “drame surréaliste,” or “Surrealist drama.” In the preface and subtitle, Apollinaire used the word “surrealism” to describe his theatrical experiment, helping establish a term that would soon define a major artistic movement.

The play freely transforms the ancient myth of Tiresias. Its central figure, Thérèse, rejects conventional feminine roles, changes sex, and becomes the male Tirésias. Comic transformations, balloons, invented situations, and deliberate theatrical absurdity are mixed with feminist, pacifist, and demographic themes shaped by the First World War.

Alfred Jarry and Jean Cocteau were also influential avant-garde dramatists, while André Breton became Surrealism’s leading theorist and manifesto writer. None of them wrote this play. Apollinaire’s authorship is especially important because the work predates the formal 1924 Surrealist manifesto while anticipating the movement’s anti-realistic methods.

The play later inspired Francis Poulenc’s opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias, first performed in 1947.