Play: Poor Bitos, or the Dinner of Heads

Overview
Jean Anouilh's Le pauvre Bitos, ou le dîner de têtes (Poor Bitos, or The Dinner of Heads), first presented in 1956, is a sharp, comic satire that skewers the vanity of intellectuals and the moral posturing of society. The play centers on Bitos, a struggling poet whose sincerity and vulnerability make him both a target and a mirror for the adults around him. Anouilh blends biting wit with absurd situations to expose the gap between artistic ideals and social hypocrisy.
The tone moves between farce and moral scrutiny, using exaggerated characters and staged confrontations to put artistic life on trial. Anouilh aims not only for laughter but for discomfort, inviting the audience to recognize how easily noble words can be reduced to self-serving rhetoric.

Plot
Bitos is presented as a poet of limited success but considerable conscience, a man whose sensitivity sets him apart from the calculating figures who orbit him. He becomes enmeshed in personal and social entanglements that reveal the self-interest and theatricality of those who claim moral or intellectual authority. Parties, flirtations, and staged debates become the arenas in which characters perform superiority while betraying pettiness.
A pivotal episode is the eponymous "dinner of heads," a gathering of prominent thinkers and moralizers who convene to pass judgment under the guise of enlightened conversation. What begins as civilized argument soon descends into caricature, as speeches and pronouncements reveal less commitment to truth than to reputation. Bitos, who comes to the table with earnest impulses, finds himself alternately manipulated, admired, and abandoned. The play's action is episodic and dialogic, built out of exchanges that increasingly strip pretence from the assembled guests.
Rather than follow the conventions of neat resolution, the narrative leaves its protagonist and the spectators with a mirror held up to their own contradictions. Events expose the cost that moralizing and self-interest exact on warmth, creativity, and human connection.

Themes and satire
At the heart of the play is a critique of intellectual pretense: the tendency of those who pontificate about virtue and art to substitute jargon and performance for real feeling. Bitos's plight dramatizes the distance between poetic aspiration and the compromises demanded by social survival. Anouilh mocks the sanctimony of public opinion and the comfort that comes from belonging to a judging circle; the "heads" consume ideas as one might consume a spectacle, more concerned with their image than with the consequences of their verdicts.
The satire also examines authenticity versus mimicry. Characters who speak loftily about ethics are often the most morally bankrupt, whereas the ostensibly weak or foolish Bitos demonstrates a stubborn human honesty. The play questions whether art can survive in a milieu that prizes status over substance, and whether a sincere artist can avoid being co-opted by the very systems he opposes.

Style and legacy
Anouilh's technique mixes crisp, epigrammatic dialogue with scenes of broad comedy. He employs theatrical artifice, ceremonial dinners, rhetorical duels, and exaggerated social rituals, to emphasize how much of public life is staged. The play's combination of cruelty and compassion, cynicism and lyricism, typifies Anouilh's mid‑career mode, where comedy serves to sharpen moral observation rather than merely entertain.
Though less frequently produced than some of his tragedies, Poor Bitos remains notable for its merciless portrait of cultural hypocrisy and its defense of a frail, stubborn humanity. Its relevance endures wherever artistic integrity meets the pressures of reputation, making it a pointed and provocative commentary on the life of the mind.