Genet, Jean

Genet, Jean (1910–86), French dramatist and poet, whose view of theatre as an act of revolt against society was conditioned by an early life spent largely in correctional institutions and prisons. His plays are now generally recognized as important not only for their extreme beauty of language but also for their creation of a disciplined, realistic form akin to that of the Theatre of Cruelty advocated by Artaud. His first play Les Bonnes, directed by Jouvet in 1947, introduced his conception of a play as ceremony and masquerade. Under the mask the characters act out their dreams and secret desires, thus demonstrating the nullity of what is usually termed ‘reality’. The ceremony, or ritual, imposed on the masquerade is designed, on the analogy of the Catholic mass, to unite the spectators in a metaphysical experience beyond normal conceptions of good and evil. This conception was developed and strengthened in Haute surveillance (1949); Le Balcon (1956), a sexual-political ceremony in which a brothel becomes the focus for a revolution; and Les Nègres (1959; NY and London, as The Blacks, 1961). Les Paravents, first performed in Berlin in 1961, deals obliquely yet perceptively with the Algerian struggle for independence; it had a stormy reception at the Odéon in 1966. As The Screens it was given an abbreviated workshop production by Peter Brook in 1964. Les Bonnes, as The Maids, was seen in New York in 1955 and in London in 1956; Haute surveillance, as Deathwatch, appeared in New York in 1958 and in London in 1961; Le Balcon was produced as The Balcony in London in 1957, but not seen in France until 1960, when it was also seen in New York.