The Inheritor

The first English-language translation of the 1968 activist play about inequality and access to education In The Inheritor, surrealist imagery and experimental forms convey the uncanny experience of attending an institute of higher education without knowledge of the unwritten rules that dictate campus culture. We follow two students, the Inheritor and the Non-Inheritor, as they prepare for a high-stakes exam, and observe how their life experiences have positioned them very differently to navigate higher education. Revealing a world of privilege where “there is no such thing as luck,” the play features a boisterous chorus of professors depicted as a flock of squawking birds, a beheaded knight, a Louvre picnic, and a talking record player.

The play was created by ThÉÂtre de l’Aquarium, a company then composed entirely of students, and based on sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s Inheritors: French Students and Their Relations to Culture. It proved a powerful success when it premiered in May 1968 amid student and worker protests in Paris, and it continues to speak forcefully to education inequity on campuses across anglophone countries today.