Jean Genet: Performance and Politics

Jean Genet: Performance and Politics C. Finburgh; C. Lavery; M. Shevtsova ISBN: 9780230595439 DOI: 10.1057/9780230595439...

Author: C. Finburgh; C. Lavery; M. Shevtsova

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Jean Genet: Performance and Politics C. Finburgh; C. Lavery; M. Shevtsova ISBN: 9780230595439 DOI: 10.1057/9780230595439 Palgrave Macmillan

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Jean Genet Performance and Politics

Edited by

Clare Finburgh, Carl Lavery and Maria Shevtsova

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Q4 Push - PalgraveConnect - 2010-12-06

Jean Genet: Performance and Politics

10.1057/9780230595439 - Jean Genet: Performance and Politics, Edited by Clare Finburgh, Carl Lavery and Maria Shevtsova


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Edited by Clare Finburgh Carl Lavery and Maria Shevtsova


Jean Genet: Performance and Politics


Editorial matter, selection, introduction © C. Finburgh, C. Lavery, M. Shevtsova 2006 All remaining chapters © respective authors 2006

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–9480–6 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–9480–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jean Genet : performance and politics / edited by Clare Finburgh, Carl Lavery & Maria Shevtsova. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–9480–3 1. Genet, Jean, 1910–1986 – Dramatic works. 2. Genet, Jean, 1910–1986 – Political and social views. I. Finburgh, Clare. II. Lavery, Carl, 1969– III. Shevtsova, Maria, 1945– PQ2613.E53Z742 2006 842.912—dc22


All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

2006045332

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List of Illustrations

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xii

Introduction Clare Finburgh, Carl Lavery and Maria Shevtsova

1

Part I Setting the Stage 1 Jean Genet in His ‘Humour’ Michel Corvin

23

2 From Theatricality to Performance Theory: The Screens David Bradby

34

3 The Theatre of Genet in Sociological Perspective Maria Shevtsova

44

Part II Politics and Performance 4 Genet’s The Screens as Media Allegory David Fieni

57

5 Reading The Blacks through the 1956 Preface: Politics and Betrayal Carl Lavery

68

6 ‘Micro-treatise on a Mini-politics’: Genet, Individualism and Collectivity Clare Finburgh

79


Contents

Part III Genet and Experimental Performance 7 Theatre in a Graveyard: Site-based Performance and the Revolution of Everyday Life Carl Lavery 8 Dancing the Impossible: Kazuo Ohno, Lindsay Kemp and Our Lady of the Flowers Martin Hargreaves

95

106

v


vi

Contents

9 Jean, Ron, Franko and Me: Genet, Body Art and Abjection Carl Lavery and Paul Woodward

117

10 The Blacks and Its Impact on African American Theatre in the United States John Warrick

131

11

143

Las criadas, Genet and Spain Maria M. Delgado

Part V Genet: Cinema and Dance 12 Corporeographies: The Dancing Body in ’adame Miroir and Un chant d’amour Elizabeth Stephens 13 Genet and Cinema: Adaptations and Influence Jane Giles

159 169

Part VI Performing Genet 14 An Interview with Joseph Strick

181

15 An Interview with Bill Rauch and Lynn Jeffries of Cornerstone Theater Company

187

16 An Interview with Jean-Baptiste Sastre

193

17 An Interview with Terry Hands

199

18 An Interview with Colin Chambers

208

19 An Interview with Richard Schechner

213

20 More Holes Than Blanket: Rehearsal Process as Political Process in Genet’s Theatre Ralph Yarrow

223

Index

235


Part IV Key Productions


1 James Earl Jones with others in The Blacks at St Mark’s Playhouse, New York, 1961. Gene Frankel (dir.). Copyright © Martha Swope.

142

2 Nuria Espert and Julieta Serrano as Claire and Solange in Las criadas at the Poliorama Theatre, Barcelona, 1969. Víctor García (dir.). Copyright © Monste Faixat.

154

3 Nuria Espert and Julieta Serrano as Claire and Solange in Las criadas at the Poliorama Theatre, Barcelona, 1969. Víctor García (dir.). Copyright © Monste Faixat.

155

4 Saïd and Leïla in The Screens/Los biombos commissioned and produced by Cornerstone Theater Company at the East LA Skills Center in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, 1998 (actors unknown). Adapted from Jean Genet by Gloria Alvarez with the collaboration of Pete Galindo, Lynn Jeffries and Peter Sellars. Peter Sellars (dir.). Copyright © Lynn Jeffries.

192

5 Image from The Screens/Los biombos commissioned and produced by Cornerstone Theater Company at the East LA Skills Center in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, 1998 (actors unknown). Adapted from Jean Genet by Gloria Alvarez with the collaboration of Pete Galindo, Lynn Jeffries and Peter Sellars. Peter Sellars (dir.). Copyright © Lynn Jeffries.

192

6 Actors in rehearsal for The Balcony, Barbican Theatre, London, 1987. Terry Hands (dir.). Copyright © Ivan Kyncl.

206

7 The Court Envoy addresses the Queen and the Three Figures in The Balcony, Barbican Theatre, London, 1987. Terry Hands (dir.). Copyright © Ivan Kyncl.

206

8 Helen Mirren as the Horse and Philip Locke as the General in Tableau Three of The Balcony, Aldwych Theatre, 1971. Terry Hands (dir.). Copyright © Douglas Jeffery.

207


List of Illustrations

vii


viii List of Illustrations

9 View of the performance space in The Balcony at the Performing Garage, The, New York, 1979/80. Richard Schechner (dir.). Copyright © Richard Schechner.

222 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Q4 Push - PalgraveConnect - 2010-12-06

10 Ron Vawter dressed as Irma in The Balcony at the Performing Garage, The, New York, 1979/80. Richard Schechner (dir.). Copyright © Richard Schechner.

221


David Bradby is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Modern French Drama 1940–1990, Beckett: Waiting for Godot (Cambridge University Press, 1991 and 2001 respectively), The Theater of Michel Vinaver (University of Michigan Press, 1993), (with Annie Sparks) Mise en Scène: French Theatre Now (Methuen, 1997), and The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the City’s Stages (co-ed. with Maria M. Delgado, Manchester University Press, 2002). He has translated Lecoq’s The Moving Body (Methuen, 2000) and translated and edited plays by Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès. With Maria M. Delgado, he edits the Contemporary Theatre Review. Michel Corvin is Professor honoré of Theatre Studies at Paris III University. He is France’s leading theatre historian and has published widely on many aspects of French theatre. His numerous publications include Le Théâtre nouveau en France (Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), Le Théâtre de recherches entre les deux guerres (L’Âge d’homme, 1974), Dictionnaire encyclopédique du théâtre (ed., Bordas, 1998) and Philippe Minyana ou la parole visible (Editions théâtrales, 2000). He has recently compiled and annotated the Pléiade edition of Genet’s theatrical works, Jean Genet: Théâtre complet (Gallimard, 2002). Maria M. Delgado is Professor in Drama and Theatre Arts at Queen Mary, University of London and author of ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth Century Spanish Stage (Manchester University Press, 2003). She is co-editor of In Contact with the Gods?: Directors Talk Theatre (Manchester University Press, 1996), Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes (Smith & Kraus, 1999) Theatre in Crisis?: Performance Manifestos for a New Century (Manchester University Press, 2002), and The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the City’s Stages (co-ed. with David Bradby, Manchester University Press, 2002). With David Bradby she edits the Contemporary Theatre Review.



David Fieni is currently writing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His thesis examines the problem of decadence in French and Arabic literature since the late nineteenth century. ix


x


Jane Giles was Director of Cinema at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London until 2004. She was Head Programmer at Film Four and previously ran the Scala cinema at the height of its notoriety. Her previous publications include The Crying Game (BFI Modern Classics, 1997), Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and the Cinema (Creation Books, 2002) and The Cinema of Jean Genet: Un chant d’amour (BFI Publishing, 1991). Martin Hargreaves lectures in Dance and Performance Studies at De Montfort University. He is also the Editor of Publications at Laban, producing Dance Theatre Journal and Discourses in Dance alongside other in-house titles. Recently Hargreaves collaborated as a dramaturge with Philipp Gehmacher and as a theorist/performer with Frankfurter Kuche. Carl Lavery is Lecturer in Theatre at Lancaster University. He has published articles on Genet and other contemporary performance practitioners in a number of journals and is currently working on a book on Genet and performance. Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her books include Theatre and Cultural Interaction (Sydney Studies, 1993) and Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (Routledge, 2004) and Fifty Key Theatre Directors (co-ed., Routledge, 2005). She is editor of two focus issues: Theatre and Interdisciplinarity for Theatre Research International (2001) and The Sociology of the Theatre (with Dan Urian) for Contemporary Theatre Review (2002), which features her essay ‘Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu’s Champ and Habitus for a Sociology of Stage Productions’. She is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.


Clare Finburgh is Lecturer in Modern Drama at the University of Essex. She has published articles on various aspects of Genet’s works, including the relationship between politics and aesthetics, his elaboration of acoustic rhythm in theatre, his contributions to scenographic design, and his deconstruction of Austinian speech–act theory. Her articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, French Forum and French Studies. Her current area of specialism is francophone theatre, and she has published on Kateb Yacine.

Elizabeth Stephens is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. She has published numerous articles on Genet’s fiction, and is currently completing a book on the relationship between sexuality, corporeality and writing in his work.



xi

Paul Woodward is Lecturer in Contemporary Performance Studies at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill. He also works professionally with First Person Dance/Theatre Company as writer and dramaturge. In the early 1990s, he performed with Glory What Glory and Sculpture Theatre Company. Ralph Yarrow is Professor and Chair of Drama at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He has directed in English and French, in Britain and India. Work at UEA includes Pirandello, Strindberg, Goll, Kokoschka, Hauptmann, Habib Tanvir and adaptations from Russell Hoban. Work in India includes Pinter and Shakespeare. His publications include Improvisation in Drama, with Antony Frost (Macmillan, 1990), European Theatre 1960–90 (Routledge, 1992), Consciousness, Literature and Theatre: Theory and Beyond, with P. Malekin (Macmillan, 1997), Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom (Curzon, 2000).


John Warrick is a PhD candidate in Theatre at the University of Washington. His recent publications include ‘Threats Without and Within: The Americanization Front and the Big Problem Plays of James Gow and Arnaud d’Usseau’ and ‘Fourth Wave and Beyond: Material Heritage and Western Critical Reaction to Femi Osofisan’.


We gratefully acknowledge permission to edit and reproduce an essay by Jane Giles from Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and Cinema© 2002,Creation Books; excerpts from Jean Genet: The Declared Enemy, trans. Charlotte Mandell© 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University English Translation; original version© Editions Gallimard, and Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, trans. J. Fort© 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University English Translation; original version© Editions Gallimard; and a section by Maria M. Delgado from ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth-Century Spanish Stage© 2003, Manchester University Press. Permission has also been granted to reproduce photographs by Montse Faixat, Douglas Jeffery, Ivan Kyncl and Martha Swope. Along with all the contributors, we would like to thank Colin Chambers, Terry Hands, Lynn Jeffries, Bill Rauch, Jean-Baptiste Sastre, Richard Schechner and Joseph Strick for their generosity in finding time in busy schedules to give interviews; Richard Schechner and Cornerstone Theatre (again!) for donating photographs; Nicola Cotton for translating Michel Corvin’s essay; the staff at The Shakespeare Institute for supplying and ‘burning’ images; Melanie Lavery for transcribing the interviews and indexing the collection; and the Drama Department at the University of East Anglia for helping to fund a symposium on Genet in October 2003, which convinced us that a new collection of essays on Genet was needed. This volume would not have been possible without the help of a grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Great Britain (AHRC), which covered travel, translation, transcription and reproduction costs. A version of Carl Lavery’s essay ‘Reading The Blacks Through the 1956 Preface: Politics and Betrayal’ was presented at the Annual Conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research at the University of Maryland, June 2005. This was funded by a travel grant awarded by the British Academy. We would also like to acknowledge the work of the team at Newgen, India, in the completion of this Book.


Acknowledgements

xii


The AHRC funds postgraduate training and research in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. The quality and range of research supported not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please see our website www.ahrc.ac.uk


Acknowledgements xiii





Introduction

[Genet is] the only giant of the twentieth century whose work was not universal but instead extreme, idiosyncratic, unique. (White, quoted in Barber, 2004, p. 9) The question of ancestry in culture is spurious. Every new manifestation in culture re-writes the past, changes old maudits into new heroes. (Marcus, 1993, p. 21) Jean Genet: Performance and Politics is intended for an English-speaking audience, and the logic for doing so is compelling. Despite endorsements from avant-garde practitioners in theatre and film (Richard Schechner, Peter Sellars, Todd Haynes), ‘alternative’ rock stars (Patti Smith, David Bowie, Shane MacGowan), and television makers (Nigel Williams, Melvyn Bragg), Anglo-American culture has paid little attention to Genet’s performance work since the 1970s, preferring instead to read him as a gay novelist.1 When Genet’s theatre is taught and staged in Anglophone countries, the texts in question are predictably—and somewhat tediously—Deathwatch and The Maids, early plays which are best regarded as apprentice pieces to his more challenging and experimental theatre of the 1950s and 1960s. Although the film Un chant d’amour is a major exception in that it is taught on many undergraduate courses, Genet’s crucial influence on contemporary theatre, film, dance and performance art has been seriously underestimated and misrepresented in North America and the United Kingdom. This general neglect of Genet’s performance work is reflected in the attitudes of English-speaking academics and scholars. In the three major anthologies to have been published in English in the past decade,



1



Flowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet (Birchall and Read, 1997), Genet: In the Name of The Enemy, (Durham, 1997) and Genet: A Special Edition of Paragraph (Hanrahan, 2004), a mere handful of the 30 or so essays deals directly with Genet’s theatre. And, despite the publication of a flurry of books in France since the mid-1990s, only two full-length studies of Genet’s theatre have appeared in English since 1990: Gene A. Plunka’s The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking (1992) and Brian Kennelly’s Unfinished Business: Tracing Incompletion in Jean Genet’s Posthumously Published Plays (1997). Ian Magedera’s monograph Les Bonnes (1998) is not a comprehensive study. This lack of interest in Genet’s theatre is prevalent, once again, in the three most recent English-language publications: Pascale Gaitet’s Queens and Revolutionaries: New Readings of Jean Genet (2003), Stephen Barber’s short thematic biography Jean Genet (2004) and Jeremy Reed’s Jean Genet: Born to Lose: An Illustrated Critical History (2005). For all of these writers, Genet’s significance as a cultural figure resides in his prose work. What can be deduced from this is that in Anglophone countries, Genet’s theatre is thought to be a minor diversion from the serious stuff of scholarship, namely, reading his novels. The reluctance of Anglo-American critics to focus on Genet’s theatre extends to current theatre practice in the United Kingdom and the United States. With the exception of Neil Bartlett’s premiere of Splendid’s at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith (1995), and the groundbreaking Chicano version of The Screens as Los biombos by Peter Sellars and Cornerstone Theater at the Skills Center in Lincoln Heights in East Los Angeles (1998), there has been no major production of Genet’s mature work in Britain and the United States since the aborted Royal Shakespeare ‘Genet Season’ (1987), and JoAnne Akalaitis’ production of The Screens at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis (1989).2 This contrasts unfavourably with the situation elsewhere in the world. In the past decade, Genet’s work has been staged by world’s best directors—and in the most prestigious venues—in Spain, Germany, Italy, Korea, Japan and Lebanon. His theatre has been especially popular in France. In 2001, the Argentinean director, Alfredo Arias acted the role of Madame in his own highly theatricalized interpretation of The Maids at the Théâtre de l’Athénée; in 2002, Frédéric Fisbach produced an experimental multimedia version of The Screens with puppets at the Théâtre de la Colline; in the season of 2003–04, Jean-Baptiste Sastre directed The Screens at the Théâtre National de Chaillot; in 2004, an operatic version of The Blacks by Stanislas Nordey was performed by the National Opera of Lyon; and in 2005, three major productions took place between January and


2


3

May: Laurent Guttman’s Splendid’s at Montreuil in the Eastern suburbs of Paris; Michel Vérical’s adaptation of Genet’s essay ‘Four Hours at Chatila’ at the Théâtre de l’Iris in Villeurbanne; and, finally, Sébastien Rajon’s production of The Balcony at the Théâtre de l’Athénée. While nothing comparable is happening in the Anglo-American theatre, there are signs that a shift in consciousness is starting to occur. In 2003 and 2004, Stanford University Press published two new translations of Genet’s aesthetic and political essays, Fragments of the Artwork and The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews; in May 2005, a rare production of The Blacks took place at Evidence Room Theater, Los Angeles; and in 2006, a new volume of Genet’s plays in translation is planned for publication by Methuen. Alongside these developments in theatre practice, there are also indications that a long-overdue critical reappraisal of Genet’s theatre is starting to occur in Britain and the United States. In the past two years, a younger generation of critics, some of whom are included in this volume, has started to apply concepts of performativity and radical philosophy to Genet’s performance practice (see Finburgh (2004), Boisseron and Ekotto (2004) and Eldridge (2005)), rather than simply using them to read his novels. As a consequence, the significance of Genet’s theatre is now being brought up-to-date and politicized, and Genet is starting to be recognized as a playwright whose texts anticipate, as David Bradby points out in this volume, the current expanded definition of the political that both post-structuralism and Cultural Studies did so much to produce in the 1970s and 1980s. For this emerging group of critics, Genet’s political significance is bound up with post-structuralist notions of identity and performativity. Yet there is, at the same time, a more direct politics at work in his texts, grounded in opposition, accusation and history. Events since 11 September 2001 have radically transformed the meaning of Genet’s late plays and, as Rustom Bharucha argues, his political relevance is now found in the way he ‘challenges us to spell out our politics in relation to … the global terror of our times’ (2003, p. 24). Bharucha is aware that Genet’s work actively resists a simple-minded approach to politics, in which revolutionaries and reactionaries are naively opposed. Nevertheless, his reservations do not prevent him from claiming Genet as the major political writer of today. For Bharucha, Genet’s theatre is crucial because it accuses the ‘First World’ spectator of siding with the capitalist forces that have done so much to cause terrorism throughout the world. His theatre is an exercise in disenchantment and accusation—it supplies the voice that the West refuses to hear. By doing so, the negativity of Genet’s theatre, claims Bharucha, has the


Introduction



capacity to work dialectically, and carries the promise of alternative futures. Twenty years after his death, Genet is arguably the playwright who, more than any other, has succeeded in bridging the gap between postmodernist performance and Brechtian critical theatre. This is because his postmodernist emphasis on theatricality and performativity is always governed, as Brecht’s was, by historical consciousness. However, as Michel Corvin explains in his chapter on humour in this book, Genet’s critique does not remain, as Brecht’s does, at the level of Marxian politics. Rather, Genet sets out to puncture all discourse, including the language of the political Left. Another important difference between Brecht and Genet can be found in the latter’s attempts to produce an affective theatre. Where Brecht is famously concerned to distance the spectator from the onstage action, Genet wants to involve the spectator in the theatrical event, and thus create a sense of actual encounter. As Elinor Fuchs has argued in an essay on The Blacks, Genet uses performance as a weapon to ‘terrorize’ the audience with ambiguity and doubt, which, according to her, he does by revealing what theatre traditionally tries to veil: the ontological void that lies at the heart of all identity (2001, pp. 344–5). Although Fuchs does not mention this, Genet’s attempt to disorientate the spectator ontologically might conceal a utopian strategy. In the original 1956 ‘Preface to The Blacks’, Genet claims that his desire to inflict existential suffering is motivated by an attempt to locate a neutral space where ethnically diverse subjects might transcend ‘the metamorphoses of history’ and find a ‘greater sense of mutual understanding’ (2002, p. 835). Comments such as these make the reluctance of English-speaking critics and practitioners to engage with Genet’s theatre and the uniqueness of its engagement appear short-sighted and insular. In order to challenge that insularity, this collection of essays aims to revise Genet’s status within conventional genealogies of performance. It does so in three principal ways. First, it highlights Genet’s theory and practice of political theatre; second, it draws attention to his multidisciplinary experiments in the fields of drama, dance, and film; and finally, it emphasizes his contribution to, and influence on, contemporary avant-garde performance practice. Jean Genet: Performance and Politics aims to encourage a new interest in staging Genet’s work. Given the current socio-political climate of neo-liberalism, and its erosion of strong political sentiments and collective action, to highlight Genet’s profound interrogation of social norms and established notions of community is nothing if not timely.


4


Introduction

5

Albert Dichy (1997) divides Genet’s career into three separate areas: novelist (1943–48), playwright (1948–61) and political militant (1968–85). Such compartmentalization invariably conceals a more complicated, and, ultimately, more vibrant, reality. When examined closely, as the essays in this collection do, the gap that supposedly separates Genet’s theatre of the 1950s and 1960s from his political engagement in the 1970s and 1980s starts to narrow. Since the political meaning of Genet’s plays remains obscure in Anglophone culture—it certainly does not fit the usual image of Genet as queer outlaw—it seems important to outline its major features here. From 1968 until his death in 1986, Genet espoused the type of engagement advocated by French intellectuals since the time when Emile Zola defended the Jew Alfred Dreyfus and condemned the French establishment. Following in the tradition of Zola, then André Gide, and later Jean-Paul Sartre, Genet positioned himself as a franc tireur, a militant whose sympathies were with the excluded and the oppressed, rather than with any one political party and/or ideology. Unlike the writers associated with the avant-garde journal Tel Quel (Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva) who, in the aftermath of the failed revolution of May 1968, championed a politics of experimental writing (écriture), Genet preferred to put his pen squarely in the service of a number of revolutionary movements and humanitarian causes, including the Viet Cong, Mao’s China, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), the Red Army Faction, the Guarani Indians, and Michel Foucault’s Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP). Although it is often assumed that the student revolt in Paris in May 1968 was the catalyst for Genet’s political commitment, his direct involvement in politics, argues Edmund White (1993), actually started in 1955 when he signed a petition against the Algerian War (see Claire Finburgh’s essay in this collection). While this alters the chronology of Genet’s engagement, it does not dispute the importance of May 1968 in his future political development, as 1968 is the year when Genet abandoned his politically ambiguous stance—unlike other French artists and writers, he had neglected to sign the famous Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian War in 1960—and entered the public arena as a fully committed intellectual.3 In the early days of the uprising, Genet sided with the Parisian students because he believed that their concept of revolution was more ‘poetic’ and ‘joyous’ (Genet, 2004, p. 20) than the conventional Marxist


Genet’s politics



notion of revolutionary change on offer at the time, which, in France, as elsewhere, was largely authoritarian and patriarchal. Genet’s predilection for a youthful, ludic form of revolt is apparent, once again, in his enthusiasm for the counter-cultural revolution in the United States in the late 1960s. Genet was drawn to the hippies because, unlike the US proletariat, who were only concerned with class conflict (ibid., pp. 34–41), they were willing to embrace different notions of race, gender and sexuality, and to reject what Genet considered to be theologically inspired ideas about the sanctity of work. Notwithstanding his lyrical commitment to American hippies and European students, Genet was influenced most profoundly by two liberation groups: the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, and his engagement to them was concrete. In 1970, he risked a lengthy prison sentence by entering the United States without a visa in order to raise funds for the Black Panthers. And throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Genet placed himself in considerable physical danger by spending long periods in the training bases and refugee camps of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jordan and Lebanon. Genet’s loyalty to the Panthers and Palestinians defies simple explanation, combining, amongst other factors, ethics, and an angry desire for revenge. Ethically, Genet was drawn to both groups because he believed that they were the weakest of the weak. At a time when western Marxism, like its Soviet counterpart, still made a fetish out of class politics, Genet was quick to align himself with those who were oppressed on racial rather than economic grounds. His blistering attack on white racism in his ‘May Day’ address at Yale University in 1970 is a good example of this: The reality of the black colony in the United States is very complex. Disseminated throughout a nation full of pride that sees itself as master of the world, black people, outnumbered among the white population, oppressed by the racism and indifference of whites, threatened by an oppressive police and judicial system, have been forced to work out a new form of struggle within this unique situation. (ibid., p. 30)


6

Yet if Genet’s commitment is based in ethics, it also has a darker, more aggressive side. In an interview with Michèle Manceaux in 1970, Genet explained that he was attracted to the Panthers because they promised to destroy the western world: ‘What touched me at first was not their concern to re-create the world … [but] their hatred for the white world, their concern to destroy a society, to smash it’ (ibid., p. 42).


7

The intensity of Genet’s commitment to the Panthers and the Palestinians did not mean that he necessarily shared their geo-political goals, which, in both instances, can be considered as the attempt to overcome the despair of diaspora through the recovery or creation of a new homeland. The Black Panthers campaigned for a separate black nation in the United States, and the Palestinians struggled—as they still do—against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Genet was keen to distance himself from the territorial claims of both groups, insisting that, ‘my situation is that of a vagabond, not a revolutionary’ (ibid., p. 43). In one of his last interviews, Genet made the following, crucial statement: ‘The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I won’t be there’ (ibid., p. 244). Despite the claims of Stewart and McGregor (1993), Marty (2003) and Jablonka (2004), Genet’s refusal of Palestinian sovereignty is not an exercise in perversity or nihilism. Rather, it gets to the very core of his concept of revolution, which, in its more utopian moments, arguably aimed at nothing less than a total transformation of the world and the production of new forms of subjectivity. This is apparent in the short essay ‘The Palestinians’ when he writes of his desire to create a ‘new man’ in terms reminiscent of Surrealist utopianism: On the bases, among the fedayeen, between each one of them and the leaders, there circulates a sort of camaraderie-in-arms, not quite socialism, rather a new kind of everyday fraternity. … They have perhaps acquired the knowledge of a new mode of living … that has unburdened them of the virile need for affection that makes men of forty or fifty seem ridiculous. … In the Middle East a new man will perhaps emerge. (ibid., pp. 73–4) Genet’s notion of revolution owes little to either Marxist orthodoxy, or to the nationalist discourses that have of necessity survived in various sections of the PLO. For Genet, as Carl Lavery (2003) proposes, the revolution is above all ethical and metaphysical: its goal is to produce a global order in which western onto-theological values of being and belonging are superseded by more human and generous modes of existence. This is illustrated in Genet’s comments about the effects of the Palestinian resistance in a little-known article published in The Journal of Palestine Studies:


Introduction

It seems to me that what has come out of this struggle in the sharpest focus is the fact that the conflict has gone beyond itself in the sense that it is no longer only against Zionism and Imperialism, but against


8


Genet’s commitment to the Palestinians, and, indeed to what in the 1960s and 1970s was generally grouped under the label ‘Third World-ism’, needs to be understood in this light. According to him, anti-colonialism is more than a simple historical practice; rather, from the utopian perspective he sometimes adopted, it offers an alternative ontological approach to the world rooted in poetry, creativity and collectivity: We are realizing more and more that a poetic emotion lies at the origin of revolutionary thought. This is why we have to understand that it is on the basis of singular poetic emotions that Mao Tse-Tung was led to revolutionary consciousness. … And it was true also for Ho Chi Minh. (2004, p. 32) Yet for all his utopian commitment to poetic revolt, Genet was also a pragmatist, a thinker who realized that revolutions are produced with guns and through violence. Thus while some of Genet’s political essays express a distinctly idealist view of global politics, he is disdainful of revolutionaries who merely make ‘empty gestures’ (ibid., p. 37). Genet’s retrospective commentary on the failure of May 1968 is sarcastic about the students who adopted such gestures: In May ’68, the students occupied a theatre, that is, a place from which power has been evacuated, where theatricality remains on its own, without danger. If they had occupied the Parisian law courts, first, that would have been much more difficult, since that building has more guards protecting it than the Odéon Theatre, but above all, they would have been obligated to send people to prison, to pronounce judgements; then you’d have the beginning of a revolution. (ibid., p. 132)


a tyrannical morality which gives rise to western values, and also to racism, anti-Semitism, capitalism and the various imperialisms. It is a morality that has imposed itself tyrannically. (1973, p. 28)

Genet also remained suspicious throughout his career of the claims of committed literature. As he states in the 1960 ‘Avertissement’ to The Balcony, political theatre is dangerously paradoxical: When the problem of a certain disorder—or evil—has been solved on stage, this shows that it has in fact been abolished, since, according to the dramatic conventions of our times, a theatrical representation can only be the representation of a fact. We can then turn our minds


Introduction

9

For Genet, conventional political theatre too often indulges the spectator by depicting the revolution as having already happened. Instead of encouraging the audience to change the world, it acts as a safety valve, and thus works to support the status quo. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, Genet advocates a different, more radical version of committed theatre—theatre as political event rather than mere spectacle.

Politics and performance The publication of three landmark texts between 1986 and 1993— Prisoner of Love, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, and Edmund White’s landmark biography Genet—significantly altered Genet’s status as artist. Henceforth, Genet could be considered, as critics such as Kate Millet (1970), Lucien Goldmann (1979) and Raymond Williams (1978) had long suspected, as a major political commentator. One of the great ironies of Genet studies, however, is that while these publications have had a considerable impact in literary circles (Dollimore, 1995; Said, 1995; Bougon, 1997; Sinfield, 1998; Hughes, 2001), they have done little to change how Genet’s theatre is interpreted and/or staged in English-speaking countries. This is astonishing, for it ignores the extent to which Genet’s decision to abandon the novel in the early 1950s was motivated by an attempt to address global issues that would be of concern to a wider public. Even more bizarrely, it overlooks the thematic similarities between The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens and Genet’s actual politics. The Balcony, for instance, looks at how revolutions are appropriated through mass-media manipulation; The Blacks explores the liberating effects of Black power, along with the inherent dangers of decolonization; and The Screens, as David Bradby recalls (1997), was the first work by a major French artist to address the taboo subject of the Algerian War. What, then, has prevented critics from returning to Genet’s theatre in the wake of the new information that emerged about his politics from 1968 to 1986? Three important factors must be taken into account. First, his preference for mythical theatre over political theatre; second, his negative representation of revolutionary movements in his late plays; third, his commitment to a theatre that questions—and ultimately deconstructs— the value and status of the theatrical frame itself.


to something else, and allow our hearts to swell with pride, seeing that we took the side of the hero who aimed—successfully—at finding the solution. (1991, p. xiv)


10


Politics, history, classical demonstrations … will have to give way to something more … sparkling. All that shit, that manure will be eliminated … If, despite ourselves, they slip into the theatrical act, they should be chased out until all traces are erased: they are the dross that should be used to make movies, TV, cartoons, romans-photo. (Genet, 2003, p. 106) Such comments make any attempt to read Genet as a political playwright appear redundant. How can political significance be attributed to a playwright who attacks the basic idea of political drama and, instead, seeks to produce a theatre of myth? Anthony Kubiak, for instance, points out that a theatre of myth returns the spectator to the ‘terror of chaos’, the time before law, politics and history (1991, p. 6). Furthermore, is not mythology, as Roland Barthes famously argued in Mythologies, opposed to the rational thought and clarity needed to dispel the illusions of ideology? And more pertinently, how can a theatre that purports to rid the stage of history and law and to replace it with terror and violence have any political impact? If Genet were to heed his own rhetoric, it would be relatively easy to define him, as Kenneth Pickering does (2005, pp. 109–10), as a mythological or ritualistic playwright interested only in using theatre for spiritual purposes. However, the issue is complicated by the subject matter of Genet’s mature plays. Unlike early plays such as Deathwatch, The Maids, Splendid’s and Elle, late texts such as The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens contradict Genet’s calls for a supposedly non-historical, mythical stage by deliberately exploring the most volatile political issues of the day. Thus while Genet is certainly interested in creating a mythological theatre, which, in his terms, is a theatre that ‘illuminates … the world of the dead’ (Genet, 2002, p. 845; our translation), this does not preclude politics as such. On the contrary, Genet’s stage is a site where politics and metaphysics merge. Like Artaudian theatre, as read by Jacques Derrida (1997), Genet’s theatre fuses two apparently impossible ideas: the sacred and the political. Yet if Genet’s theatre is as politically relevant as we claim, why do Anglophone critics persist in ignoring it? A major reason for this is


In numerous articles and interviews from the 1950s onwards, Genet is consistent in his claims that political drama—drama that attempts to educate its audience either through mimesis or defamiliarization— betrays ‘the virtues unique to theatre’, which, as he claims in ‘That Strange Word …’, have to do ‘with myth’. Genet continues:


11

undoubtedly due to Genet’s insistence upon failure. Genet’s plays appear to offer little in the way of revolutionary hope. In The Balcony, the ‘revolution’ is defeated by the forces of reaction; in The Blacks, the liberated Blacks appear to be on the verge of repeating the mistakes of the colonizer; and in The Screens, the abject hero Saïd is shot by a member of the post-revolutionary guard, and the realm of the Dead is the only place where a positive sense of community might emerge. Moreover, the political nihilism that supposedly haunts the content of Genet’s plays seems to be heightened by his formal concern with theatrical selfreflexivity—what Lionel Abel famously termed ‘metatheatre’ (1963)—by which theatre becomes an oneiric prison, a negative dream space. The apparent negativity of the Genetian stage, along with its radical deconstruction of the theatrical form itself, has tended to dissuade English-speaking critics from seriously engaging with its politics. In Anglophone theatre cultures, political theatre is generally still associated with Brechtian and neo-Brechtian techniques that allow for an engaged, materialist analysis of the political issues at stake (see Kershaw, 1999; Gottlieb, 2003 and Patterson, 2004). In this tradition, theatre such as Genet’s, which seeks to question reality and to dissolve the theatrical frame is not accorded serious political significance; its poetic, metaphysical and affective qualities appear to have little in common with the type of thinking which is believed to be needed to transform social reality.4 Regardless of the silence of Anglophone commentators, not all critics are willing to renounce the political value of Genet’s stage. In the past decade, a new generation of French-speaking scholars, informed by post-structuralist theory, has produced a series of alternative readings. For critics such as Marie-Claude Hubert (1996), Alain-Bernard Marchand (1997), Marie Redonnet (2000) and Hédi Khelil (2001), the philosophical principles underpinning Sartrean and Brechtian aesthetics are untenable in a postmodern world, where the very idea of art is deeply compromised. According to them, what is needed is a resistant theatre, a theatre whose radical questioning of theatricality works to subvert essentialized notions of identity and reality. For them, Genet is a political playwright in the contemporary sense of the word, that is to say, a playwright who is no longer interested in providing meta-theatrical solutions, but rather one who is sensitive to difference and suspicious of images and simulacra. While the critics mentioned could not be accused of depending on the author as sole source of authority, their affirmative interpretations are consistent with Genet’s own, less-guarded description of his theory of political theatre towards the end of his life. In a late interview in 1983,


Introduction



Genet abandoned his previous anti-political position and admitted that his work did, after all, ‘approach politics obliquely’ (2004, p. 246). In important but neglected prefaces such as the ‘Avertissement’ to The Balcony and the 1956 ‘Preface to The Blacks’, Genet advances a notion of political theatre that is neither didactic nor based on realism. His primary interest, in both texts, is in provoking discomfort and sowing doubt—’wounding’ the audience (2002, p. 838)—as a necessary prelude to what, for him, is a more effective and utopian model of political performance based on ambiguity and affect. Michel Corvin (2002) is surely correct when he says that Genet’s theatre is political without being engaged, a phrase which describes a mode of performance whose political significance resides in its capacity to disorientate rather than to defamiliarize its audience. The intention behind this disorientation is not to reveal a metaphysical truth existing beyond representation and theatre; on the contrary, it is designed to reveal the abyss that the ‘theatricality of power’ (Genet, 2004, p. 131; translation modified) strives so hard to conceal. For Genet, the void is not an empty, sterile space; on the contrary, it is, as many of the contributors to Jean Genet: Performance and Politics argue, a space of ethical obligation and political renewal.

Genet and performance Less fixed in structure than those of Brecht and Beckett, Genet’s plays are notoriously difficult to stage and make extraordinary demands on actors, directors and spectators alike, a factor which doubtless explains why the most innovative theatre directors of the past 50 years have been—and continue to be—fascinated by his work.5 Genet’s dramas demand active co-creation on the part of those who stage them in that they invite directors to liberate the radical energy located in the script by experimenting with environment, casting and site. As Maria Delgado’s essay in this collection on Victor García’s reworking of The Maids as Las criadas proves, the most successful productions of Genet’s play have been achieved when directors have abandoned the author’s words and instructions and treated the original as a score for performance rather than as a blueprint. Instead of trying to fix Genet as an absurdist, sacred or ritualistic playwright in the mould of Ionesco, Grotowski or The Living Theatre (Esslin, 1968; Borie, 1981; Plunka, 1992) the essays in this collection attempt to ‘blast’ Genet of his ‘historical continuum’ (Benjamin, 1988, p. 261), and to situate him in the present. For us, it makes more sense to talk of Genet’s work in terms of performance rather than theatre, since the whole thrust of his practice is to


12


13

dismantle conventional notions of theatrical representation and to de-structure traditional dramatic forms. Genet has no restorative agenda for theatre; on the contrary, his desire to make the audience ‘consume empty signs’ (Shevtsova, 1987) is an attempt to destroy theatre from within. In the language of contemporary performance theory, Genet seeks to replace theatre’s semiotic framework, what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls its ‘nihilism’ (2003, p. 25), with a more dangerous and radical aesthetic that exploits the ‘liveness’ of the theatrical event. In The Balcony, The Blacks, and in his site-specific plans for The Screens as described in the essay ‘That Strange Word …’, it is impossible to pinpoint, with any authority or accuracy, where performance ends and everyday life begins. As a result of this deliberate attempt to trouble the vicarious logic of theatrical illusion, Genet’s plays need to be seen for what they most certainly are—harbingers of an alternative aesthetic, works that shift the focus from the theatrical to the performative. Genet shows us that performance is not divorced from reality; rather, for him, performance is productive of reality. The avant-gardist impulse that so dominates Genet’s mature theatre surely accounts for the palpable influence of his work in a wide range of contemporary practices, including queer cinema, postmodern dance, site-based theatre and body art, where the emphasis is not on representing identity in terms of essentialized substance but rather on highlighting its constructed and manufactured quality. There is a further reason why Genet merits the title of performance maker rather than dramatist. Genet, like Samuel Beckett and Antonin Artaud, is much more than a playwright and novelist. His film Prisoner of Love, which won the award for best new film when it was released in France in 1975, almost 25 years after it was made (White, 1993, pp. 673–4), is commonly acknowledged as one of the most important films in the history of queer cinema. Furthermore, Genet’s notion of dance, as expressed in his novels and essays, and practised in the Surrealist ballet ’adame Miroir, has directly influenced, as Martin Hargreaves explains in this collection, a generation of key choreographers. Genet was also a sophisticated theorist who, in a series of essays from the 1950s to the 1980s, developed a singular concept of performance that attempted to conceive a notion of theatre that might avoid consumer appropriation and, in some way, contest the dominance of visual media (photography, television and cinema) that invaded French culture in the aftermath of the Algerian War. Genet calls for a selfconsciously performative and hieratic theatre in which actors, directors and spectators are encouraged to participate in a rigorous process of self-negation and existential searching. Little has been written about


Introduction


14


Structure This collection is divided into six parts. In Part I, ‘Setting the Stage’, Michel Corvin, David Bradby and Maria Shevtsova introduce the major themes of the book, namely performance and politics. Corvin highlights the three factors that Genet himself identifies as being central to his drama: ‘humour’, ‘language’ and ‘theatre’. For Corvin, Genet’s mode of humour constantly undermines the veracity of his dramatic narratives and foregrounds their status as ‘theatre’, in other words, illusion, artifice, art. Therefore, states Corvin, any political or social issues in Genet’s plays are essentially no more than ‘language’. Corvin warns that any approach to Genet must maintain a necessary distance to respect the non-literal nature of all his theatre. This caveat is indeed heeded by the theoreticians and practitioners in this book, all of whom seek to respect the complex ways in which Genet’s work resists simplistic critical appropriation or easily assimilable moral or didactic synthesis. Bradby, for instance, stresses the political significance emerging from Genet’s resistance to literal politics. What Corvin refers to as ‘theatre’— illusion and artifice—is understood by Bradby in terms of performance theory. In Bradby’s view, Genet’s drama is nothing more than theatre, performance, discourse, words. However, since categories of power and identity are also forms of performance, Bradby argues that they can be deconstructed and reconstructed, like theatre itself. As such, he makes clear the association between performance and political potential in Genet’s theatre. Where Bradby argues that Genet’s aesthetic deconstruction enables an affirmative politics of identity reconfiguration, Maria Shevtsova focuses on the difficulties of understanding Genet’s playtexts from a sociological perspective, especially given their politics and aesthetics of obliqueness. Taking The Blacks as a test case, she argues that Genet’s characters are caught in a deadlock of counterfeits, which is integral to his exploration of metaphors of theatricality: the latter suggests political impotence. Shevtsova discusses the socio-political context


this aspect of Genet’s work by English-speaking critics and how practitioners engage with it. This volume tries to rectify this situation by documenting key productions, talking to important directors and theatre companies, and reflecting on the processes involved in staging one of Genet’s plays. It is hoped that Genet’s position as a major driving force in the history of twentieth-century performance will finally be acknowledged, and that a forgotten European-based genealogy for theatre and performance studies will start to re-emerge.


15

that generated Genet’s plays, including decolonization, and refers to the problematical aspects of Lucien Goldmann’s sociological analysis. Shevtsova’s approach is framed by sociology; Corvin’s by semiotics; and Bradby’s by Cultural Studies. But all three reach parallel conclusions that a too-easy appropriation of Genet as a political playwright per se must be avoided. Concepts such as theatricality and deconstruction are also prominent in Part II, ‘Performance and Politics’. David Fieni’s essay proposes that The Screens is an allegory for, and critique of, the role of mass-media communication in an age of war. Additionally, Fieni looks at how the play anticipates the placatory and conservative role performed by commodities in French society in the aftermath of the Algerian War. For Fieni, however, Genet’s exposure of a ‘politics of plasticity’ ought not to be understood in terms of despair; on the contrary, refusing authenticity and stability provides individuals, he contends, with the capacity for political resistance and existential liberation. Lavery and Finburgh both acknowledge the inherent undecidability of meaning in Genet’s plays. However, like Fieni, they too are concerned to move beyond what might be termed the hesitant politics of deconstruction. Lavery warns that unitary post-structuralist readings of Genet lay the dramatist open to accusations of nihilism, even fascism, since they do not account for the complexities of the playwright’s own sophisticated theories of political performance. By contrast, Lavery discerns in Genet’s recently published ‘Preface to The Blacks’ an affirmatory tone and proposes that the play transcends mere ‘theatre’, or theatrical diversion, to become a real event, a space where black actors are able to reveal their real objectification by a white audience. Finburgh’s essay also attempts to move Genet beyond the constant deferral of meaning usually attributed to him. She proposes that whilst a systematic betrayal of all truths, beliefs and systems is central to Genet’s novels and early plays, in his later plays he merges this insistence on radical betrayal with an ethics of community. Part III, ‘Genet and Experimental Performance’, provides the first account of Genet’s engagement with, and impact, on experimental performance. Genet’s suggestion in ‘That Strange Word …’ that theatre be staged in a city-centre cemetery is understood by Lavery in terms of site-specific theatre, avant la lettre. In this contemporary art form, the site is perceived anew when it hosts the performance. Everyday consciousness is thus liberated from the mediocrity of habitual responses, and poeticized. Again, here, Lavery suggests that Genet’s theatre bears revolutionary potential beyond its own aesthetic limits. Martin Hargreaves further advances the link between Genet and experimental


Introduction



performance by turning his attention to Genet’s influence on dance. He shows how the fluidity of gender categories in Genet’s novels inspired avant-garde dance makers like Kazuo Ohno and Lindsay Kemp to produce new, imaginative choreographies. Although they, too, focus on the body, Lavery and Paul Woodward are interested in a different, less pristine area of experimental performance. According to them, Genet’s exploration of abjection informs the extreme body practices of queer artists such Franko B and Ron Athey, both of whom use performance as a tool for resisting normalizing political and sexual hegemonies. Part IV, ‘Key Productions’, highlights the profound impact that Genet’s plays have had on theatre practitioners in the United States and Europe by concentrating on two landmark productions. John Warrick explains how the 1961 New York premiere of The Blacks enabled the establishment of the Negro Ensemble Company, and influenced a generation of African American playwrights. Likewise, Maria Delgado suggests that Victor García’s and Nuria Espert’s 1969 production of The Maids as Las criadas encouraged a new wave of non-naturalistic theatrical practice in Spain. Anticipating the arguments of the practitioners in Part V, Delgado claims that García’s adventurous reworking of The Maids galvanized Genet’s theatre by abandoning the original script. Part V, ‘Genet: Cinema and Dance’, has a dual focus, and pays particular attention to issues of gender and sexuality. Elizabeth Stephens’ essay examines the significance of contemporary dance in Genet’s ballet ’adame Miroir, and film Un chant d’amour. Stephens echoes Bradby’s and Fieni’s arguments that the Genetian subject can reconfigure itself, and is therefore politically powerful. For Stephens, dance in Genet’s two silent works symbolizes self-transformation, the possibility of transcending the confines of fixed heteronormative identities. Stephens’ insights are supported by film historian Jane Giles, who describes Genet’s parallel influence on Japanese film of the 1960s, and on what is today known as queer cinema. She also details film adaptations of Genet’s works, and the interview with Joseph Strick, director of the 1963 film of The Balcony, complements this part of her study. Part VI, ‘Performing Genet’, concentrates on the practical problems involved in staging Genet’s notoriously difficult work. The practitioners interviewed all testify that Genet’s theatre cannot be performed in a straightforward way. Betrayal is central to Genet’s works, and the practitioners themselves highlight the need to betray Genet’s texts by employing their own bold choices. Jean-Baptiste Sastre, Lynn Jeffries and Bill Rauch, and Richard Schechner state that Genet’s stage directions and commentaries are unhelpful if read literally, and must therefore be


16


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re-imagined and re-invented. In their respective interviews, both Terry Hands and Colin Chambers argue that the experimental and political nature of Genet’s theatre has prevented his work from being embraced by UK theatre practitioners. For them, Genet is too politically and aesthetically visionary for the British stage. The creative originality and radical energy demanded by Genet’s theatre is further illustrated by Richard Schechner’s approaches to rehearsal and acting, which attempt to resist the familiarity of simple psychological identifications. Ralph Yarrow’s essay provides a fitting conclusion to the volume by emphasizing how the performer’s refusal of the ontological comfort of fixed identities in the rehearsal process deconstructs normative social roles. For Yarrow, performing in Genet’s plays is a form of ethical and political liberation in itself. As editors, we have endeavoured to embrace a plurality of different voices and styles in an attempt to echo the range of fields, disciplines and artistic forms that Genet’s works affect. Equally, we have encouraged the contributors to submit their own translations of Genet’s plays and theoretical essays. As several of the practitioners point out, the original English translations of Genet’s plays need to be either up-dated or perhaps even abandoned. The translations made by some of contributors to this volume are a step in that direction.

Notes 1. Jeremy Reed’s Jean Genet: Born to Lose is a perfect illustration of this tendency. In his book, there is no indication that Genet even wrote plays. 2. For a thorough analysis of The Screens/Los biombos see M. Sigal (1998) and D. J. Hopkins (2003). 3. Genet’s first political article, ‘Les Maîtresses de Lénine’ (2004), was published on 30 May 1968 in a special edition of the popular weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. In it, he defended the student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit from anti-Semitic slurs made by the newspaper L’Humanité, the official organ of Le Parti Communiste Français (PCF). 4. This would also explain the British reluctance to take seriously the politics of playwrights such as Howard Barker and David Rudkin. The exception to this is found in the work of David Ian Rabey (1989). 5. Since the 1960s there have been key productions of his work by Peter Brook, Herbert Blau, Erwin Piscator, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Richard Schechner, Giorgio Strehler, Terry Hands, Patrice Chéreau, Peter Stein, Victor García, Peter Sellars and Moriaki Watanabe.


Introduction

Works cited Abel, L. Metatheater: A View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963).



Barber, S. Jean Genet (London: Reaktion, 2004). Barthes, R. Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). Benjamin, W. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations and Other Essays, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1988), pp. 253–64. Bharucha, R. ‘Genet in Manila: Reclaiming the Chaos of The Times’, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, 62 (2003), 15–28. Birchall, I. and B. Read (eds). Flowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet (London: Middlesex University Press, 1997). Boisseron, B. and F. Ekotto. ‘Genet’s The Blacks: “And Why Does One Laugh at a Negro?” ‘, Genet, ed. M Hanrahan, special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004), 98–112. Borie, M. Mythe et théâtre aujourd’hui: une quête impossible … (Beckett, Genet, Grotowski, Le Living Theatre) (Paris: Nizet, 1981). Bougon, P. ‘The Politics of Enmity’, Genet: The Language of the Enemy, Yale French Studies, 91, ed. S. Durham (1997), 141–58. Bradby, D. ‘Genet, the Theatre and the Algerian War’ in Flowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet, eds, B. Read and I. Birchall (London: Middlesex University Press, 1997), pp. 156–72. Corvin, M. ‘Une dramaturgie du politique’, in Jean Genet: Théâtre Complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 1133–44. Derrida, J. ‘The Theater of Cruelty and The Closure of Representation’, in Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought, ed. T. Murray, trans. A. Bass (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 40–62. Dichy, A. ‘Jean Genet: Portrait of the Artist as Warrior’, in Flowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet, eds, B. Read and I. Birchall (London: Middlesex University Press, 1997), pp. 21–5. Dollimore, J. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Durham, S. (ed.). Genet: In the Language of the Enemy, Yale French Studies, 91 (1997). Eldridge, L. ‘Genet’s The Maids: Performativity in Performance’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 25: 2 (2005), 99–113. Esslin, M. The Theatre of the Absurd, 2nd enlarged edn (London: Penguin, 1968). Finburgh, C. ‘Speech Without Acts: Politics and Speech-Act Theory in Genet’s The Balcony’, Genet, ed. M. Hanrahan, special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004), 113–29. Fuchs, E. ‘Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four TwentiethCentury Plays’, Modern Drama, 44: 3 (2001), 337–54. Gaitet, P. Queens and Revolutionaries: New Readings of Jean Genet (London: Associated University Press, 2003). Genet, J. ‘The Palestinians’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 3: 1, trans. M. Dobson (1973), 3–34. —— The Balcony, trans, T. Hands and B. Wright (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). —— ‘Lettres à Roger Blin’, in Jean Genet: Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 845–77. —— Fragments of the Artwork, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). —— The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. A. Dichy, trans. J. Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).


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Goldmann, L. ‘The Theater of Jean Genet: A Sociological Study’, in Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds, P. Brooks and J. Halpern, trans. P. Dreyfus (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), pp. 31–46. Gottlieb, V. ‘Theatre Today—the ‘new realism’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13: 2 (2003), 5–14. Hanrahan, M. (ed.). Genet, special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004). Hopkins, D. J. ‘Mapping The Placeless Place: Pedestrian Performance in the Urban Spaces of Los Angeles’, Modern Drama, 46: 2 (2003), 261–84. Hubert, M-C. L’Esthétique de Jean Genet (Paris: Sedes, 1996). Hughes, E. Writing Marginality in French Fiction: From Loti to Genet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Jablonka, I. Les Vérités inavouables de Jean Genet (Paris: Seuil, 2004). Kennelly, B. Unfinished Business: Tracing Incompletion in Jean Genet’s Posthumously Published Plays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). Kershaw, B. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Khélil, H. Figures de l’altérité dans le théâtre de Jean Genet. Lecture des Nègres et des Paravents (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). Kubiak, A. Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991). Lavery, C. ‘The Ethics of the Wound: A New Interpretation of Genet’s Politics’, The Journal of European Studies, 33: 2 (2003), 161–76. Lyotard, J-F. ‘The Tooth, The Palm’, in Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. P. Auslander, trans, A. Knap and M. Benamou, vol. 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 25–31. Magedera, I. Les Bonnes (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1998). Marchand, A-B. Genet. Le joueur impénitent (Quebec: Herbes Rouges, 1997). Marcus, G. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1993). Marty, E. Bref Séjour á Jérusalem (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Millet, K. Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970). Patterson, M. Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Pickering, K. Keys Concepts in Drama and Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Plunka, G. The Rites of Passage of Jean Genet: The Art and Aesthetics of Risk Taking (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). Rabey, D. I. Howard Barker: Politics and Desire (London: Macmillan, 1989). Redonnet, M. Jean Genet, le poète travesti. Portrait d’une œuvre (Paris: Grasset, 2000). Reed, J. Jean Genet: Born to Lose: An Illustrated Critical History (London: Creation, 2005). Said, E. ‘On Genet’s Late Work’, in Imperialism and Theatre, ed. J. Ellen Gainor (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 230–42. Shevtsova, M. ‘The Consumption of Empty Signs: Jean Genet’s The Balcony’, Modern Drama, 30: 1 (1987), 35–45. Sigal, M. ‘Jean Genet’s The Screens Directed by Peter Sellars’, TheatreForum, 13 (1998), 76–83.


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Sinfield, A. ‘How Transgressive Do We Want to Be? What About Genet?’, in Gay and After (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), pp. 129–45. Stewart, H. and R. McGregor, Jean Genet: From Fascism to Nihilism (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). White, E. Genet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). —— ‘Introduction’, in S. Barber, Jean Genet: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion, 2004), pp. 7–9. Williams, R. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Penguin, 1978).


Part I


Setting the Stage





1 Jean Genet in His ‘Humour’1

Paul Valéry—a man of humour if ever there was one—once said: ‘The word humour is untranslatable. If it were not, the French would not use it. They use it precisely because of the indeterminacy they give to it.’2 But the French do not really give the word indeterminacy, since indeterminacy belongs to the word itself: humour hovers somewhere between sarcasm, irony, satire, mockery, allusion, antiphrasis, whim, jest, witticism, pun and caricature. In fact, if today the French word for humour retains such a richness and elusiveness, it is thanks to the English, because, as everyone knows, the French word derives from the English, this itself deriving from the old French humeur. English has reclaimed from the old French the sense of ‘a disposition towards cheerfulness’, whereas French has retained only a ‘disposition towards irritation’ (avoir de l’humeur: ‘to be bad-tempered’). In English, the word ‘humour’ evolved during the eighteenth century to designate the ability to present amusing, unusual, or sometimes absurd aspects of reality with a degree of detachment. It is this idea of detachment, or distance, or even of gratuitousness and withdrawal to a position of aloofness, that I wish primarily to explore; an English idea, that has had an impact on the French concept of humour. Originally, humour in French had a meaning close to esprit, or ‘wit’ (avoir de l’esprit to be witty’). The Dictionnaire Littré further defines the word as ‘liveliness of imagination, comic verve’. The English sense of the word did not appear in French until the nineteenth century, notably in the works of Baudelaire. Which means that whilst the notion of humour has been adopted in France, it is still considered to be an English idiosyncrasy. In his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, Flaubert could have written an entry ‘English Humour’ as opposed to just ‘Humour’. Let us look at this form more closely, and analyse briefly a humour which is not


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Michel Corvin

English, but which corresponds to the English criteria: Jean Genet’s humour. What is Genet’s humour? In his private writings, notably in his correspondence with his agent Bernard Frechtman, Genet shows himself to be a man of wit, with a gift for caustic prose and a savage irony that are expressed, more often than not, through his use of slang. From time to time, Genet also shows that he knows how not to take himself seriously by creating a certain distance from himself. This may well be. But can Genet as dramatic author and as writer of fiction—not only he, but any playwright—be said to demonstrate humour in the precise sense I have given to the term, that is, humour that creates a distance from what is said or done? At first glance, I would have to say no, because playwrights do not exist—at least, not within their plays. Even though the playwrights, and no one else, pull the strings of their puppet characters, they are careful not to let themselves be seen, and above all, not to draw the attention of an inquisitive reader to their concealed presence. Playwrights let their creations fight it out for themselves on stage.3 Up to Pirandello, all the Classics except the baroque authors chose to abide by this law: without it, the phenomenon of theatrical illusion simply could not have functioned. After all, one does not speak of the humour of Racine the man. If, on occasion, authors have the conceit to intervene a little too obviously in their own work, and in their own name, they can descend, like Molière, into deliberate comedy or satire. Molière in The Misanthrope actually mentions his own work when Philinte describes himself and Alceste as being ‘like the brothers in The School for Husbands’ (1959, p. 27). Sartre also intervenes in his plays, which are subsequently reduced to philosophical sermons. Notably, he speaks via Orestes’s mouth in The Flies, the latter saying, ‘I am my freedom’ (1946, p. 95). If authors really cannot resist showing themselves, they have recourse to parabasis. Aristophanes’s Chorus-Leader in Clouds speaks on the author’s behalf, saying, ‘So may I be victorious, so may I be thought a true artist, I took you for an intelligent audience and this for the most intellectual of my comedies, and therefore saw fit to give you the first taste of it’ (1982, p. 59). Or else, writers use prologues and explanatory epilogues, like Brecht. At least such a procedure has the merit of being explicit and honest, as opposed to Sartre’s more covert existentialist propaganda. There is no law, however, against dishonesty and cheating. In fact, there exists an underhand type of humour which consists in the writer intervening in the work without being seen. A paradox, one might say, or the perverse whim of a cunning intellectual who makes a gesture


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towards humour as quickly as he withdraws it. Take two examples from Genet’s The Maids: first, when Claire posing as Madame says to her sister, ‘If Monsieur is in prison, it is thanks to me’ (2002, p. 131).4 This ‘thanks’ is very odd for the spectator who does not yet know that the Madame who is speaking is not the real Madame, but Claire. The word therefore leads the spectator to think that Monsieur was arrested thanks to his lover, which would, of course, be a rather strange way of showing her love. Swept along by the rapid tempo inevitable in a theatrical performance, the spectator is unable to intellectualize the flow of words. The ‘thanks’ therefore passes unnoticed. This is Genet’s humour. He takes pleasure in catching his audience out, and in constructing his plays according to a dual system: one for the reader who knows almost everything straight away—or who can at least take time to reflect—the other for the hapless spectator who sees, but does not understand. Genet will take revenge on anyone who is deceived into thinking that his visually spectacular dramatic images are simple, and will deny them access to the real meaning of his theatre. More or less the same observation can be made of the following exchange: CLAIRE: SOLANGE: CLAIRE (ironique):

… Tu m’aimes et me respectes … Je ferais l’impossible … Je sais. Tu me jetterais au feu. (2002, p. 132)

[CLAIRE: … You love and respect me … SOLANGE: I’d do all in my power— CLAIRE (ironically): I know. You’d go through fire for me … (1989, p. 40)] If just one letter were different—t instead of m—the phrase would be banal. But it is transformed by Genet in an almost inaudible and undetectable way, as his sarcastic humour sneaks into the whole of his oeuvre. No doubt, the character alone is responsible for what she says, but she owes the construction of her speech to Genet, the subtle lexicologist. One suspects him of having a quiet laugh at his own linguistic misappropriations and at his discreet ways of assuming power. He changes the familiar expression ‘tu te jetterais au feu’ (You’d go through fire for me, meaning ‘You would do anything for me’), to ‘Tu me jetterais au feu’ (‘You would throw me in the fire’). By modifying a fixed French expression ever so slightly, Genet not only gives it back its literal and violent force, but also makes it absolutely untranslatable.5 This, I would


Jean Genet in His ‘Humour’ 25


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suggest, is the most effective way of asserting that a text is the exclusive property of its author. This is also an extreme and relatively rare case in Genet’s work, because he mostly treats his characters as though they were old enough to look after themselves, and does not make them speak on his behalf. And they, like their author, treat their fellow characters, and indeed themselves, with humour. When they show their humour, a certain theatricality reverberates throughout the play—that is to say, the play highlights its own artifice—which forestalls any moralism, didacticism or pathos. For instance, at the end of the last version of Deathwatch when the Guard delivers his one and only line;6 or in The Penal Colony when the Director and Chaplain discuss the guard Marchetti’s murder by convicts in terms of a ‘drama’, and Ferrand’s arrest in terms of a ‘coup de théâtre’ (2002, pp. 807–8). This self-conscious theatricality is a process common to any theatre that gives a knowing wink of complicity to the spectator. In the wrong hands, it can drag a play into the vacuousness of light comedy. When humour is applied to the development of the action or to the plot in which the characters are implicated, it bears importance of quite a different order in that it becomes structural. Genet’s characters are endowed with humour, and they demonstrate the distance and detachment which I identified earlier as being the fundamental semantic characteristics of humour. But this detachment brings about a change in the nature of the characters: from their usual function as the driving force of the play’s action (whether or not they are main characters), they turn into witnesses, or indeed judges, or even stage directors. After all, what is a character who does not entirely wish to be there—who flees the action or whose participation in the action can only be glimpsed through gestures and words—if not a substitute for the author and, since this is the theatre, a director of the other characters’ actions?7 Multiple variations to this model are possible: even if authors cleverly conceal themselves in characters who are happy to speak on their behalf, their presence throughout the play will still be constant—as is the case with Pirandello or with Dubillard—and the play will never succeed in attaining consistency. Instead, it will be doomed to perpetual procrastination or incompleteness (of which a circular structure is an obvious sign) because the author’s voice—especially that of Dubillard through the character Guillaume in Le Jardin aux betteraves or through Félix in Où boivent les vaches, both of whom are effectively incarnations of the author himself—makes itself heard and indicates that situations or exchanges cannot escape the ominpresent eye or covert smile of the


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author-god, and the actors therefore cannot ‘set’ (as one might say of mayonnaise or ice cream). In opposition to this formula—significant in its effects, yet relatively discreet in terms of its authorial interventionism—is a more obvious procedure, whereby the author overtly delegates the responsibility for the development of the plot to a character who is defined as being outside the action. Archibald in The Blacks is a case in point. Alternatively, the author can adopt a more subtle strategy, whereby one or several of the characters remain on the sidelines of the action and comment on it for the benefit of the attentive reader/spectator who is able to make a distinction between the levels of prominence of different characters in the play. This is the function of Carmen and of the Envoy in The Balcony. From his very first line, the Envoy represents humour in its purest form: elusive and impossible to locate, he constantly flouts the principle of non-contradiction; blows hot and cold; shifts between fake terror and philosophical calm. So much so—and this is his unspoken, but obvious aim—that he exasperates the Chief of Police. It is he who pulls the strings in the play and he who turns it into a pretence where the action is nothing more than words. The Envoy states that Irma is the Queen and, ipso facto, she becomes the Queen. This is humour which raises a smile (otherwise, it would be black humour) provoked by the feeling of superiority the Envoy fosters in relation to his speech partners (can one still speak of speech partners if he refuses to communicate?) and which he allows the reader to share, doubtless in the name of Genet himself. At this point, I wish to raise an objection which may cause my entire critical edifice to crumble. If proof of humour is to be found in distancing oneself from the dramatic action, then Brecht is the greatest humorist of all. Fortunately, however, this is not the case (even though Brecht is no lightweight when it comes to humour. Think, for example, of his Verfremdungseffekte, namely distancing techniques), because in between Genet’s humourous distancing tactics and Brecht’s epic dramaturgy, there lies the unbridgeable gulf of what is ideologically at stake in the theatrical enterprise. It is with some relief, then, that I can develop my hypothesis further. If Archibald, Carmen and the Envoy demonstrate humour and detachment, it is not only as characters who are granted status as voyeurs; entrusted by the author with the task of alerting the reader to the dual system of the play—that of the action taking place, and that of the commentary explaining it. These three characters also give substance to the thoughts of the author, and Archibald, the most Brechtian of the three, acts as Genet’s actual spokesperson.




Michel Corvin

Through their intervention, and by means of a variety of other devices such as inconsistencies in the plot, Genet effectively wrecks his plays as he writes them. Or if Genet does not wreck them altogether, at least he denies them any degree of veracity. By means of direct intervention, he betrays both himself, and the conventional way in which the plays progress. But if one is aware of the position betrayal plays in Genet’s philosophy, one might say that the form of humour under discussion here is the dramatic equivalent of that betrayal. In order to betray, one must operate covertly, but not so much that one passes unnoticed—otherwise, how would anyone know that they had been betrayed? Genet thus pretends to be a serious dramatist, even a classical dramatist, who allows his characters to adhere to what they say and do, but who lets slip just enough to awaken suspicion. This does not alter the fact, however, that certain critics and directors are reluctant to expose Genet’s double game, and continue to present The Maids, The Blacks, The Screens, or even The Balcony, as socially and politically reliable and identifiable plays.8 Genet’s preferred method for raising the reader’s/spectator’s suspicion is through his use of language: it is too florid, too polished, too obviously writerly to be realistic or appropriate for the characters. According to traditional aesthetics, stage characters speak a language appropriate to their profession and social standing. Their speech conforms to a mimetic notion of theatricality developed by Aristotle, and perpetuated by Diderot. Genet, by contrast, makes his characters speak a language that is other, bombastic, false, rhetorical. It does not belong to anyone, and is intended specifically to be out of keeping, and to signal a deviation from one of the most enduring codes of classical dramaturgy—appropriateness. This is the position adopted by Genet the humorist which the critics—especially at the time of The Maids—failed to understand, and which they attributed to his supposed incompetence as a writer. They did not notice the signs of Genet’s rejection of appropriateness or propriety that abound on so many levels in his plays. Take, for example, the tales Genet invents: preposterous, implausible stories. In The Blacks there is a murder which is not a murder, which happens in Africa, or Paris, or in the French countryside—we are not sure—with actors who lay claim to a social status and a profession which turn out to be false; with a play-within-a-play which is staged like a puppet show but is invested with such power that it causes Village’s great distress and Diouf’s betrayal of the Blacks. The Balcony contains even more cock-and-bull stories, with a brothel which turns into a palace; dignitaries who are puppets and vice versa; a mausoleum carved into a


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rock which is also one of the brothel’s salons; a revolution which might be taking place (so Genet says himself) inside the brothel, or outside. What exactly is the point of all this? Genet aims not only to be confusing and ironic and to give his plays a dreamlike quality, but, on a deeper level, to unmask the ‘resounding inanity’ of all theatre, to denounce its pretention at considering itself capable of delivering a message, to reduce it to mere appearance, apparition, image.9 Only a few pivotal characters escape this grand illusion: Carmen, the assistant brothel-keeper in The Balcony, is not taken in by Irma’s rhetoric. She even dares to make fun of the Chief of Police whom she pushes around like a child. It is she who knows how to tell a story—as Irma says, ‘Carmen has a genius for describing things’ (1991, p. 41)—and who enjoys a privileged relationship to language. She alone escapes the insults of the revolutionaries, and her clothes remain intact unlike those of the others, which are reduced to tatters by the rubble. And all this, because she is—excuse the expression—an out-of-work whore whose last job has just finished (her apparition as the Virgin of Lourdes in a sex fantasy) and whose next job has not yet started (her metamorphosis into Saint Theresa of the Infant Jesus in another sex fantasy). Because Carmen is out of work, hence not trapped inside the action of the play, her character has a more objective reality than that of the revolutionaries. For we cannot say for certain whether the revolutionaries are on the inside or the outside of the brothel (in the existential, and the spatial sense of the term). What happens next, will confirm this: in Tableau Five, Carmen retains the clear-sightedness of a witness and as a result, her character cannot be a driving force for the dramatic action. Later in the play, she says, ‘I am here for all eternity’, indicating that she has no effect on the development of the plot (1991, p. 66). As for the Envoy, this angel from on high, he is the grand Master of Ceremonies. As the Great Manipulator, it is he who relaunches the play when it threatens to grind to a halt at the beginning of Tableau Seven. He gives it renewed direction when the female pimp Irma is transformed into a queen. The puppet rulers become Figureheads with a capital F, and the Chief of Police is crowned king of the underworld. But all this is nothing more than play, a play on words, a play with words, a play on humour. Outside the world of words, nothing happens. But words possess the magical power to create something ex nihilo. Take, for instance, Mallarmé’s celebrated phrase, ‘I say “a flower!” and beyond oblivion, where my voice excludes no contour, the real and sweet-smelling idea, the missing flower from every bouquet, musically appears, as something




Michel Corvin

more than just plain sepals’ (1974, pp. 857–8). If Genet wishes to place his work within an aesthetic where everything is reduced to unreality and to nothing, it is essential that he uses humour to take a stranglehold on words at the very moment when they are uttered. Genet sets the theatre ablaze, and it is humour that both reveals his strategy, and acts as its incendiary device. Although certain characters are placed in charge of his theatrical arson, they carry out the task with sufficient ambiguity— his humour does not broadcast its effects—that lazy readers fall into the trap and continue to think that The Blacks is an anti-colonial play, or that The Balcony announces the great day of the Revolution. When the Envoy says ‘I mean that the Queen is embroidering, and that she isn’t embroidering. She picks her nose, examines the snot extirpated, and then lies down’, the Chief of Police, who remains impervious to all humour (otherwise, how could he be the Chief of Police?!), takes these games of wit as a provocation aimed at him personally, and gets furious (1991, p. 59). At the end of Tableau Seven, the Envoy’s lines descend bathetically from formality into vulgarity: THE ENVOY (After a last glance through the shutters): Yes, but hurry. Go to your apartments. Embroider an interminable handkerchief (To the CHIEF OF POLICE) And you—go and give your last orders to your last men … (Goes over to the mirror. Takes a whole collection of decorations out of his pocket and pins them on to his tunic) … (Viciously) Oh, get on with it! I’m fed up listening to your crap! (1991, p. 68) This is not a lapse of taste that one might ascribe to Genet’s poor education. Rather, the Envoy shatters the hitherto serious tone, and lowers the whole tableau and the entire play to the level of his farcical remarks. The humorous semantic content of these comments is made all the more striking because Genet enhances it by writing corresponding humour into the actor’s tone of voice, his gestures, and his costume. Consequently, the character becomes a monument to humour. This is not to say that Genet does not intervene in the course of his plays in his own name and with his own brand of humour. He does this in his surprising stage directions. In The Maids, at the moment when Madame, anxious to rejoin Monsieur, asks Solange to find her a taxi, Madame utters the words ‘dépêchez-toi’ (‘Hurry up’), the sense of which is explained by the following stage direction: ‘the slip is intentional’—an arcane comment, which nevertheless allows us to see how Genet amuses himself by rolling the two maids into one through this confusion of singular and plural (2002, p. 153; 1989, p. 72).10 Similarly, at the beginning


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THE ENVOY (still in a thoroughly irritating tone. A know-all since infancy): It is a true image, born of a false spectacle. (1991, p. 76) When Genet was preparing the second edition of his major work, The Screens, he could not resist annotating it. He did so by way of commentaries where he linked together the three elements which, in my view, sum up his aesthetic: verbal creation, Theatre (the upper case is Genet’s), and humour. The following quotation illustrates this: The reader of this play—The Screens—will soon realise that I have no idea what I am writing. Take the roses, for instance. Instead of telling us about his flowers, Mr Blankensee tells us about his thorns. Now, every horticulturist knows that if there are too many thorns and if they are too large, the flower is deprived of sap and of all that is necessary for a lasting and beautiful bloom. Too many thorns are harmful, and Mr Blankensee appears totally oblivious to this. His profession is not the cultivation of roses; it is Theatre. But it is I who have invented this colonial and his rose garden. My error can— indeed must— serve as an indication. If, because of this mistake of mine, Mr Blankensee is striving for the beauty of thorns [épines]—or why not the beauty of pricks [pines]—rather than the beauty of flowers, he leaves the rose garden, and joins the Theatre. Perhaps the same can be said of all the other scenes: they must be spoken in a certain way in order for the shift from the literal to the theatrical to be noticed. I have messed around a lot in this play—and I don’t deny it, not for a second! (2002, p. 637)


of Tableau Nine of The Balcony, when the Envoy intervenes in the author’s name a little too clearly and markedly, in order to draw out the philosophical lesson from the mascarade he directs, we are given a humorous stage direction which also functions on another level as a serious comment. The direction is intended to sweeten the bitter pill of a truly Sartrean affirmation:

What Genet terms a ‘shift’, I would happily call humour, even if the way he expresses himself ‘n’est pas so british!’11 Translated by Nicola Cotton and Clare Finburgh

Notes 1. Editor’s note: Corvin’s title alludes to Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour, which treats ‘humour’ as obsessive quirks of disposition.


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2. Paul Valéry, Aventure (November 1921). The rest of this reference is no longer traceable. 3. Once the author writes the words ‘The End’ on the last page of the manuscript, s/he withdraws into the wings and leaves the work to stand alone. It begins its independent life, and the author continues her/his life, without interference between the two—not on a theatrical level at least. The work is the child of its author, but one that is snatched away at birth—a fact which the author of course cannot bear. Hence the continual and lively debate between writers and directors: the former feel robbed and betrayed, whilst the latter appropriate for themselves a resource that is, literally speaking, anonymous; there to be consumed in whatever way one desires. The whole problem of the ambiguous status of the theatrical work arises here: at once both private and public, the work offers an image of itself, but cannot control (or censor) how that image is perceived or interpreted. 4. Frechtman omits this line from his translation. 5. Editor’s note: For this reason, no doubt, Wright and Hands omit Genet’s modification from their translation. 6. The Guard says: ‘We have heard everything and seen everything. From where you were standing it might have seemed comical. For us spying through the eyepiece, it has been a beautiful scene from a tragedy. Thank you.’ (Genet, 2002, pp. 31–2). By stating that the scene between the three prisoners resembles a classical tragedy, the Guard self-consciously indicates the play’s theatricality. 7. One might say that a theatre of action is historically dated and that for this reason Genet avoids it. In fact, one of the several ways in which Genet lays traps is by giving the impression that he continues to inscribe his dramaturgy in the order of action (plot that develops; relationships between characters; more or less clearly defined space and time) so that he can blow it all apart from within, and locate his dramaturgy in the order of being. Editor’s note: In his as yet unpublished essay ‘Du théâtre de l’acte au théâtre de l’être’, Corvin distinguishes between a théâtre de l’action and a théâtre de l’être (theatre of state). The theatre of action, originating from Aristotle’s Poetics and the Ancient Greek concept of drama meaning ‘action’, shows humans taking action and intervening in their own fate. Notable examples include Antigone and Electra. More modern instances include Sartre’s existential heroes whose actions determine their future. In a theatre of state, contrastingly, either action takes place, but has no effect or impact, for example in Hugo’s or Musset’s Romantic theatre, or else action and events are eclipsed by static descriptions, like in the theatre of today’s authors Eugène Durif or Philippe Minyana. This sense of failure was developed further by Camus and Anouilh to show the absurdity and futility of all action. For Corvin, Genet is located at the unique intersection between the theatres of action and of state, since his plays contain action and events, but their contradictory nature reduces them to mere word and image that in no way serve to advance plot or effect change. Genet’s is a théâtre du faire-rêve (‘theatre of illusory action’). 8. Editor’s note: For a complete account of the directors and critics who interpret The Maids as a social or political play, see Genet (2001). 9. This assertion is rather bald. In the context of a more in-depth analysis of the general economy of Genet’s theatre, it would be vital to emphasize the fact


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that the message does exist and is, moreover, highly political, but that it is also oblique, indirect, hidden, somehow sunken. Genet’s theatre speaks out only against, never in favour of anyone or anything. Any political position he takes, he will subsequently undermine. 10. Translator’s note: The wordplay is untranslatable, since in English the second-person form of address does not distinguish between singular and plural, and imperatives do not use pronouns. Madame ‘roll[s] the two maids into one by addressing Claire and Solange using the plural verb ‘dépêchez’, followed by the singular pronoun ‘toi’. 11. Translator’s note: The English word ‘British’ features in Corvin’s original French text. The colloquial term ‘n’est pas so british’ can be translated as ‘isn’t very kosher’. ‘British’ means conventional, regular, conforming with the rules.

Works cited Aristophanes. Clouds, trans. A.H. Sommerstein (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1982), p. 59. Genet, J. The Maids, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). —— The Balcony, trans. T. Hands and B. Wright (London: Faber and Faber 1991). —— Les Bonnes, ed. M. Corvin (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 2001). —— Jean Genet: Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Mallarmé, S. ‘Avant-dire’, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Molière, J-B. The Misanthrope, trans. John Wood (London: Penguin, 1959). Sartre, J-P. The Flies, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946).




2 From Theatricality to Performance Theory: The Screens

Theatricality and the discourse of mise en scène Genet’s plays were written before the advent of what is now defined as performance theory, at a time when theorists in France were attempting to analyse the specific qualities of theatricality. One of the most influential voices in this debate was that of Roland Barthes, who, in 1954, posed the following rhetorical question: ‘What is theatricality? It is theatre-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations which is constructed on stage starting from the written argument’ (1972, p. 26).1 Barthes’s notion of theatricality was developed in response to a different theatre from Genet’s—the theatre of Brecht. Attempting to explain the complexity of Brecht’s productions at the Berliner Ensemble, Roland Barthes, Bernard Dort and others associated with the review Théâtre Populaire developed the theory of a specifically theatrical means of expression: the discourse of mise en scène. They were principally concerned to explain how text should be seen as only one of a number of signifying systems at work in a theatre production. Practitioners, too, contributed to this process, and it was Roger Planchon who coined the term écriture scénique (stage writing, as opposed to the textual writing of the playwright) when attempting to articulate the lesson that Brecht had taught the French theatre. To liberate mise en scène from subservience to the text, to recognize écriture scénique in its own right, was seen as a way of opening up a space for political critique in stage productions. The failure of the near-revolution of 1968 inaugurated a period of radical questioning in France, where critics and practitioners alike challenged the very purpose and function of theatre. Brechtian strategies no longer seemed adequate and far-reaching questions were raised about


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the relative importance of text and mise en scène. For critics and scholars, semiotic theory appeared for a while to be the only way to get a firm analytical grip on theatrical specificity. Barthes had ceased to write about theatre, but his colleague on Théâtre Populaire, Dort, was a founder member, in 1970, of a new review, Travail Théâtral. The title of this journal proclaimed its desire to investigate process as much as product, and the variety of different working practices that go to make up a theatre production. At this time, Genet’s plays were an inspiration to a group of young practitioners, many of Hispanic origin, most notably Victor García. Their productions sought to develop purely theatrical means of signification, often at the expense of text.2 This phenomenon was all part of French theatre belatedly coming to terms with surrealism and helps to explain the successes of Fernando Arrabal, Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, and an impressive French theatre of fabulous imagery. The development of the theatre of visionary surrealism was accompanied by developments in post-structural theories of subjectivity: the concept of a stable self was dismantled by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others. Discontinuity was emphasized and the presentation of self in the work of major playwrights (for example, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Michel Vinaver) came more and more to employ the metaphor of fragmented pieces of a puzzle that noone could ever hope to fit together again. Baudrillard developed the theory of the simulacrum and it seemed as though the performance of self had entirely replaced traditional notions of the stable subject inherited from Descartes. Dort explained just how Genet’s theatre enacts a deconstructionist programme by starting from an exaltation of the theatrical aesthetic in which everything is transformed into play/performance (le jeu), but then pushing it to an extreme point where it negates its own ability to act as a vehicle for meaning: ‘But this jeu does not secrete its own truth … rather, it destroys itself, revealing to us only its own nothingness’ (1971, p. 188). As Clare Finburgh has observed, Genet’s opening discussion of the blank page in Prisoner of Love also demonstrates ‘[his] dynamic of the image and the void’, of presence and absence (2004, pp. 205–6), which, in its turn, recalls the playwright’s words to Roger Blin when he was rehearsing The Screens: ‘True and not true (but not false) the truth of this story lies between these two opposites’ (Genet, quoted in Dichy and Bellity Peskine, 1986, p. 10). Genet’s last complete play, The Screens, enacts at a metaphorical level the debates about the performance of self and of power that were new in the 1960s. Roger Blin’s staging of this play at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in April 1966 undermined the notion of ‘theatricality’ as originally defined


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by Barthes through its enactment of Genet’s aesthetic of death and nothingness. This production has been seen by many as a kind of rehearsal for the events of 1968, and it is not hard to see why. It had a premonitory force, pointing the way towards a new form of political theatre, and focusing on the complex interrelationships of power, language and the poetic imagination. This form was to supersede the Brechtian model that had dominated a large sector of French theatre during the previous ten years. At the level of the individual, as well as the body politic, Genet’s work foreshadowed what was to come. The post-1968 years were when Derridean deconstruction spread, undermining the Cartesian sense that the thinking subject guaranteed its own ontological continuity. In this way, deconstruction broke with the relative optimism of Sartrean existentialism, grounded, as it had been, on the assumption that an authentic choice was at least possible for the individual, even if rarely achieved in practice. Instead the postmodern subject is aware that the only choices available are between different ideological masks. These are some of the points of overlap between the preoccupations of postmodern thinkers and Genet’s dismantling of ideological constructs, especially in The Screens.

Performance theory Patrice Pavis has pointed out that French theories of theatricality and mise en scène have developed in surprising isolation from AngloAmerican performance theory (2004). He argues that where, in the 1970s and 1980s, performance theory strengthened English-speaking theatre’s interest in identity politics, in France the theatre clung onto the Brechtian heritage and the traditions of the Enlightenment, believing in an historical hermeneutics which defines the work as a set of variations on a dramatic text. It might be argued that a similar ignorance of developments in France characterizes the Anglo-Saxon world—not in terms of theory, but in terms of theatre work, especially the work of Genet. Insofar as performance theorists draw on the methods and assumptions of deconstruction, their attitude towards the subjective self is something they share with Genet, whether they acknowledge it or not. Neither believes in the notion of a stable presence or personality as the underlying foundation of a human being. Philip Auslander writes about this in his essay ‘Just be Yourself’, where he shows that all the established theories of acting, whether Stanislavskian, Brechtian, or Grotowskian, depend on the notion that the performance can only be truthful if it invokes the presence of the actor’s self as its originary,


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grounding presence (1997, p. 34). But for Derrida, no such foundational self can be invoked as the source of meaning, since meaning is produced by différance, that is, by contrast with what it is not. ‘Meaning’— Auslander paraphrases—is ‘produced by the action of something which is not present, which exists only as an absence’ (ibid., p. 28). Genet was, of course, profoundly aware of the impossibility of ‘just being himself’. This emerges clearly from the interview he gave to the BBC ‘Arena’ programme in 1985. When Nigel Williams asked him ‘Is it the real Genet we are meeting?’, he instantly replied with another question: ‘Is there a false one going around?’ (Genet, 1997, p. 57). He used the inept interviewer’s question as an opportunity to throw back at him what he thought of simplistic concepts of authentic presence. Auslander’s article concludes by wondering what deconstructive theatre might consist of. Perhaps, he writes ‘[it] might simultaneously use the vocabularies of conventional acting methods and styles and undermine them’ (1997, p. 38). Auslander makes no mention of the striking articulation of just such a process of undermining conventional acting methods in the letters written by Genet to Blin about his 1966 staging of The Screens, although he writes in another essay about how these ideas are put into practice by the Wooster Group as a practical example of performance that might be understood as deconstructive in the terms he has articulated (ibid., pp. 39–45). The difference between the ideas of theatricality promoted by Barthes and his colleagues in the 1950s and those of performance theory today is that the performance theorists do not restrict themselves to analysing what takes place in a theatre. They explore how concepts and behaviour that may be rooted in the theatre have come to affect every aspect of life, drawing not only on the work of anthropologists and sociologists, but also theorists of business and management, and even the US space programme. Performance theory has developed a number of different strands whose common preoccupation is with understanding how symbolic forms act on live bodies. The moment in Genet’s novel Miracle of the Rose when the murderer’s chains are transformed into garlands of roses is an imaginative evocation of such an action. The means of studying the interaction between symbolic forms and real bodies proposed by performance theory is to examine those experiences or stages in a person’s life that are defined as ‘liminal’. By liminality is meant ‘a mode of activity whose spatial, temporal and symbolic “inbetweenness” allows for social norms to be suspended, challenged, played with, perhaps even transformed’ (McKenzie, 2001, p. 50). The screens central to Genet’s play of that title proclaim the play’s action




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and location as liminal. Initially used to indicate the spaces of colonial hegemony, they are appropriated and redefined by the revolutionary forces in the course of the action. In the use of screens Genet invents a remarkably simple yet effective metaphor for the concept of liminality, which is a key idea in performance theory, borrowed essentially from the writings on this subject of the anthropologist Victor Turner. The screens are used to conjure up a sense of the world as an assemblage of realities and people whose contours and definitions are being constantly displaced, challenged or altered and in which the ultimate separation (between life and death) is finally breached in spectacular form by almost every one of the characters as they burst through the screens. What better metaphor for liminality? And yet, not only is Genet absent from much of the published discussion of this field, most bizarrely of all, The Screens is actually erased in one of the most recent and authoritative publications defining this field: Richard Schechner’s encyclopedic Performance Studies—An Introduction, in which a mere three lines are devoted to Genet, followed by what purports to be a bibliography of his plays, but which omits, precisely, The Screens (2002, p. 125). Jon McKenzie, in Perform or Else, sees performance theory as being centrally concerned with challenges of various kinds. He picks out what he calls ‘the challenge of efficacity’ and explains it thus: ‘Performance scholars have constructed cultural performance as … an ensemble of activities with the potential to uphold social arrangements or, alternatively, to change people and societies’ (2001, p. 30). Efficacity is, perhaps surprisingly, a word also used by Genet. In his ‘Letter to Jean-Jacques Pauvert’ he talks of ‘the efficacity of beauty’ as the main function of art (2002, p. 818) and in one of the letters to his translator, Bernard Frechtman, Genet says, when speaking of the function of theatre, that ‘we all seek efficacity’ (ibid., p. 919). In both cases, he is talking of precisely the same thing as McKenzie, that is, the effects of cultural performance on social and political structures. There are many instances of such effects enacted in The Screens. When, for example, the lieutenant says, in Tableau Eleven, ‘Sergeant! Your men are brushing up their Foreign Legion oaths, I hope? I want the men to be lyrical, realistic, randy’ (Genet, 1963, p. 73) or when Genet recommends that the entry of the Legionaries be performed backwards, like the Blue Bell Girls, he illustrates precisely the importance of cultural performance in the maintenance of a colonial regime. In the play, of course, the cause of these glamorous Legionaries is already lost, as is the mystique of Warda, the grande dame of prostitutes. Far more effective in changing the social and political situation is the


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secret power of the Dead, the neglected, the despised, expressed, for example, through the mouth of the dead Si Slimane or through the inscriptions on, and manipulation of, the screens by the Arabs. In this way, Genet expresses the same truth as Turner, who talks of the liminal phase being in the ‘subjunctive mood’ of culture, expressed through ambiguous symbols that suggest both womb and tomb (Turner, 1990, p. 11). McKenzie’s book shows how performance theory has moved away from its anthropological roots and has become a widespread tool for reinforcing existing power structures in every conceivable area of life. After the failure of 1968 to transform social structures, all would-be radical performers found themselves in a quandary that has not changed in 35 years: How to devise a radical performance whose challenge to existing structures can be efficacious, while also avoiding the trap of co-option. Baz Kershaw’s The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard explores the difficulties facing any would-be radical performer in the face of the seemingly limitless ability of postmodern cultural hegemonies to commodify even the most oppositional performances, and hence draw the sting from them. It is in this context that Genet offers what can be seen as an original strategy, especially in The Screens, which is to devise a way of viewing Western and Northern hemisphere hegemonies through the eyes of the dispossessed. In both The Blacks and The Screens, he makes a prodigious effort to imagine how the constitution of language and, hence, power look from the point of view of colonized peoples. Performance theorists rely a great deal on anthropological observations of practices in preindustrial societies, but it is they who define the frameworks and the structures within which these practices and performances are to be placed and understood. What made Genet extraordinary was his determination to place himself in the position of the oppressed; he applied his insights into language, and into symbolic structures that act on real bodies, to the depiction of power relations on a global scale, always taking the perspective of the ‘damned of the earth’. Genet was himself intensely alive to the dangers of the attempt to transform people into myths. In the ‘Arena’ interview he repeatedly expressed his anger that the BBC team was trying to turn him into an icon: ‘You, like everyone else, want to transform me into a myth’ (Genet, 1997, p. 61). The televized interview finished with a long quotation from ‘What Remains of a Rembrandt’, in which he reflected on the experience of seeing the man opposite him in the railway carriage and experiencing the conviction that ‘every man is worth every other’ (Genet, 1968, p. 21).3 In The Screens, the audience sees not only the




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struggle of competing mythical images, but also their transformation, degradation and decay. Set against this is Saïd’s determination to avoid coinciding with the image of him held by others, to escape entirely from the process whereby one crosses the threshold of one’s own personal screen to become forever fixed in mythical form. The play, as a whole, questions this process. It demonstrates how language and all examples of cultural performance are a way of manipulating or masking power that is exercised on real bodies, and asks if there is any way out, if there can be any reality outside that of the performance of self. How would one define it? Presumably it could be defined only as an absence, and Genet made it plain that this was exactly what he had tried to do with the character of Warda. In a letter to Blin, he wrote: ‘Warda is rather difficult: an extraordinary emptiness has more presence than the most condensed fullness. … Plays, usually, or so it is said, are supposed to have a meaning: not this one. It is a festivity whose elements are disparate’ (Genet, 2002, p. 847). Because of this, he was wary of anyone who tried to make the play into a simple anti-war tract. Nevertheless, he was delighted at the scandal that Blin’s production provoked.

The second French production of The Screens, June 1983 Chéreau’s revival of the play in 1983 was informed by the same intellectual debates as those fuelling the growing body of performance theory in Anglo-American culture. The production was part of the opening season of his new Théâtre des Amandiers at Nanterre, where the May-June events of 1968 had had their origin, and Chéreau was very conscious of the suburb’s connotations in the minds of his audience. His opening season was the culmination of 17 years’ work in which he had conducted systematic experiments with a wide range of different types of staging and had tried to draw the consequences of developments in deconstructive thought for the art of the stage. His opening season included two new productions: before The Screens, in February, came Black Battles with Dogs (Combat de nègre et de chiens), the play that was to make Bernard-Marie Koltès known worldwide. It was also in 1983 that Chéreau’s most successful film L’Homme blessé was released, and the productions of both The Screens and Black Battles with Dogs can be partly understood as his attempt to test the limits of theatre in comparison with the medium of film. The Koltès play, set on the construction site of a bridge in Africa, was performed in a space that could have been a film


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studio—a vast, sand-filled arena dominated by what appeared to be a real concrete road bridge. It was large enough and solid enough for a real pick-up truck to roar in and out at various points, and critics complained that the distances were such that some of Koltès’ text became inaudible. Anne-Françoise Benhamou suggests that in this opening season Chéreau was aiming for ‘a sort of theatrical self-mutilation’ (2001, p. 354). He was, in other words, trying to inscribe the plays of Koltès and Genet in the Nanterre theatre spaces following the self-same autodestructive methods that Genet celebrates in The Screens. David Fancy agrees with Benhamou, suggesting that Chéreau was using hyperrealism to ‘destabilize the epistemological grounding of illusion’ to the point where all theatricality implodes on itself in ‘a dark vision of the collapse of Western theatrical representation altogether’ (2004, p. 76). Undoubtedly, as both suggest, Chéreau was interested in exploring the relations between theatricality and power through his productions. But Benhamou goes further, arguing that everything in this production was focused on the attempt to ‘undo’ the theatrical image. Within this perspective, the aim of a stage production is no longer to exalt the image but to move towards its erasure. Just as Derrida invents the idea of ‘writing under erasure’, so Chéreau appeared to be ‘staging under erasure’. For The Screens, Chéreau made use of the ‘reality’ of cinema to undermine the theatricality of Genet’s text: the play was performed in Nanterre’s main theatre auditorium which was transformed into a cinema (modelled on a lost cinema interior of the Barbès district of Northern Paris). The many screens specified in Genet’s stage directions were absent and the only screen visible for most of the performance was a blank and rather decrepit cinema screen, stretched across the breadth of the stage, and which reduced its depth to a few feet. This was used by Chéreau to suggest the erasure of the image, leaving behind nothing but a blank void. The production emphasized the differences between three groups— colonials and military; Arab rebels; the Nettle Family. The text was heavily cut, removing all those elements that are playfully theatrical such as the wordplay with the Gendarme in Tableau Nine, the animal noises and evocation of the wind, and much of Warda’s scenes. Chéreau deliberately underplayed the mythical dimension, since he saw the key quality of the play as its destruction and denial of the mythical image:



It begins with an image, only to break it through the movement of things, through their nature. At the same time as it sets up this image, it shatters it. It is the destruction of appearances. The image of the


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Corvin and Dichy sum up the difficulties referred to by Chéreau here as those of building a production around an absence. This difficulty was, of course, all the greater because Blin’s 1966 production was so vividly present in the collective memory of theatregoers and performers. Genet insisted, against Chéreau’s initial judgement, that the role of the Mother be played by María Casares, as it had been in 1966. Always something of an outsider in French theatrical circles, her extraordinary interpretation maintained a trace of that earlier production, hovering, ghost-like, on the margins, already history, absent, faded from the screen, and yet disturbingly present. She incarnated the principle of différance, in which meaning is generated by what is absent or marginal.

Conclusion While performance theorists writing in English have adopted Derridean perspectives and incorporated theories of deconstruction and the ‘supplement’, they have yet to explore how the work of French theatre practitioners, and especially the plays of Genet, contribute to postmodern perspectives on performance. The theoretical discourse of the performance theorists remains surprisingly impermeable to the lessons of practical performance in countries outside the English-speaking world. Genet’s plays nevertheless demonstrate forcefully how an aesthetics of deconstruction can go hand in hand with an ethics and a politics of the Other, recognizing the central insights of performance theory while nevertheless affirming the possibility of contesting the endless exchange of role-playing. Peter Sellars’s 1998 production of The Screens as Los biombos in Los Angeles pointed towards one way of drawing on Genet’s insights.4 Others will surely follow.


brothel, like that of the French army, is overturned. Suddenly the principal characters are those who decide that they will offer no image of themselves, will not even coincide with any image. (Chéreau, quoted in Genet, 2002, p. 1272)

Notes 1. Translations are mine unless indictated otherwise in Works cited. 2. Victor García directed a version of Les Bonnes as Las criadas in Barcelona in February 1969 and another of The Balcony in Sao Paolo, Brazil in December 1969. 3. See Carl Lavery (2003), in which he draws out the political implications of this moment.


From Theatricality to Performance Theory: The Screens 43 4. See Michèle Sigal (1998) and (2003). The text was very freely adapted by the Latino poet Gloria Alvarez, changing all the names and reference points so that it was transformed into a play about life in the slums of Los Angeles.

Auslander, P. ‘Just be Yourself’, in From Acting to Performance (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 28–38. Barthes, R. Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: North Western University Press, 1972). Benhamou, A-F. ‘Patrice Chéreau: la chair du visible’, in La Scène et les images, ed., B. Picon-Vallin (Paris: CNRS, 2001), pp. 341–9. Chéreau, P. ‘Le Châtiment de Genet’, in Genet: Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 1272. Dichy, A. and Bellity Peskine, L. La Bataille des Paravents (Paris: Le Théâtre de l’Odéon, 1986). Dort, B. ‘Genet ou le combat avec le théâtre’, in Théâtre réel (Paris: Seuil, 1971), pp. 173–89. Fancy, D. ‘The “Darkness” at the end of the theatre: Chéreau, Koltès, Nanterre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14: 4 (2004), 68–82. Finburgh, C. ‘Unveiling the Void: The Presence of Absence in the Scenography of Genet’s The Screens’, Theatre Journal, 56 (2004), 205–24. Genet, J. The Screens, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). —— Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). —— ‘BBC Arena interview’, in Flowers and Revolution, eds, B. Read and I. Birchall (London: Middlesex University Press, 1997), pp. 52–62. —— Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Kershaw, B. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 1999). Lavery, C. ‘Ethics of the Wound’, Journal of European Studies, 33: 2 (2003), 161–76. McKenzie, J. Perform or Else (London: Routledge, 2001). Pavis, P. ‘Mise en scène, Performance: What is the Difference?’, lecture delivered at Queen Mary, University of London, 29 January 2004. Schechner, R. Performance Studies—An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002). Sigal, M. ‘Jean Genet’s The Screens directed by Peter Sellars’, TheatreForum, 13 (1998), 76–83. —— ‘Los biombos/The Screens: Jean Genet à Los Angeles’, in Peter Sellars, ed., F. Maurin (Paris: CNRS, 2003), pp. 374–92. Turner, V. ‘Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual and Drama?’, in By Means of Performance, eds, R. Schechner and W. Appel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 8–18.


Works cited


3 The Theatre of Genet in Sociological Perspective

Normally abrasive and evasive about his work, Genet could not have been more candid when he observed that his approach to society was always oblique (Genet, 2004, p. 262). The occasion for these words was a filmed interview with Nigel Williams for the BBC in London in 1985— the last interview he was ever to give—and Genet’s tough manner was, by now, almost ready to change. After all, he no longer needed to insist he was ‘hard’. He had been through some seriously tough business in the United States among the Black Panthers whose liberation cause he had supported during the early 1970s. He had lived, during these same years but at various times, with the Palestinians in the Middle East whose conditions of perpetual war left little room for fine sensibilities. And, in September 1982, he was among the first witnesses of the massacre of the Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon. The discussion in London, however, had not turned to political atrocities but to Genet’s theatre. Genet continues: [My approach] is not direct. It’s also not parallel, since it intersects and crosses through society, it crosses through the world, it sees the world. It’s oblique. I saw the world from a [diagonal], and I still see it from a [diagonal], though perhaps more directly now than twenty-five or thirty years ago. The theater, in any case the theater that I prefer, is precisely the kind that grasps the world from an angle. (ibid.; translation modified)


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Genet’s image of the diagonal is indeed appropriate for a dramatic output that eschews the direct presentation typical of social and psychological realism. All his devices are oblique—metaphor, symbol, ritual, allegory—which he compounds in constructions operating to all intents 44


and purposes like montage. Montage, too, is a process of indirect perception and, anything but linear, it seeks to compress space and time. Thus Genet’s stage direction for The Balcony, which states that scenes should move from left to right, is an attempt to suggest simultaneity of action (2002, p. 258).1 Irma’s eye moves in sequence as she observes the scenes played and replayed in her brothel every night. However, the events which she cannot help but perceive sequentially, happen at the same time. The Blacks and The Screens follow a similar spatio-temporal principle. The performance on stage played by Blacks playing both Blacks and Whites occurs concurrently with an offstage ‘performance’—the execution of a Black by Blacks. The latter event, albeit invisible, is juxtaposed against the visible performance (which is another form of execution), much like Madame’s offstage aggression in The Maids against Claire and Solange. The title alone of The Screens evokes the idea of partitioned spaces which coexist differently yet appear to the gaze as one. Meanwhile, the work is built on layers, with scenes that pile up rather than flow out towards an end. Dominated by montage from their very core, Genet’s four major plays resist the narrative order and exposition which, in a realist aesthetic, provide important cues and clues to sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Does all this mean that only a theatre directly related to society, or at least one ascertained to be directly related to it by mimesis or verisimilitude, conveys social meaning and is open to sociological study? Does it also mean that Genet’s theatre, which is structured as theatre-inthe-theatre, is fundamentally reflexive and thus really only about the theatre? Reflexive structure, or mise en abyme, is certainly inward-looking, like a kaleidoscope. Or else it is like the mirrors in The Balcony which are used to ‘put’ the image of the audience in the theatre on the stage itself, both images reproducing each other. This procedure recalls Jean Baudrillard with whose thought Genet’s work has a superficial affinity. Nevertheless, unlike Baudrillard (1996), Genet does not set up chains of ever-receding signs incapable of denoting anything because they are only signs of signs and not of material entities. For all the semiotic play of his texts, where signs are deceptive because they are false, Genet does not re-run Baudrillard. Nor do his worlds of simulations and simulacra, where everyone plays at being someone else, deny all possibility of reality (as, arguably, does Baudrillard’s notion of the ‘hyperreal’ (1993, pp. 70–6)). A semiotics in the Baudrillard style would destroy social intelligibility; and characters who are called collectively ‘Blacks’ or ‘revolutionaries’, or represent social stereotypes, as do ‘Queen’ or ‘Judge’, or


The Theatre of Genet in Sociological Perspective 45


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singular social beings, as do ‘Saïd’ and ‘Leïla’, would have no referents in the phenomenological, real world. The problem lies in identifying these referents in Genet’s theatre, which, in Irma’s definition of her brothel, is a ‘house of illusions’ (Genet, 2002, p. 293). The difficulties posed by Genet’s aesthetic for a sociological perspective are certainly real enough, and are complicated by two additional factors to do with intention. Unlike his novels, which he intended to write, Genet became a playwright by circumstance, all his plays being commissioned, as he confirms in his interview with Nigel Williams (2004, p. 246). The Maids, for instance, which Louis Jouvet staged in 1947, was the result of Jouvet’s request for a play limited to two actresses, since he could not afford to pay for more. The Blacks, to take another example, was commissioned in 1955 by the director Raymond Rouleau who wanted something exclusively for black actors (2002, p. 836); and this pragmatic consideration determined Genet’s organization of the play (no matter how creatively he wrote it). The second factor concerns political intention which, despite the ostensibly political content of The Blacks and The Screens, seems to be absent from his writing. Or, at least, it does not appear to motivate his writing. Brecht would be the apposite contrast to make this point clear. Once again, the issue has to be brought back to Genet’s ‘diagonal’, which redefines not only the notion of intention, but that of politics as well, as both pertain to his theatre. In a 1983 interview Genet noted, regarding The Maids ‘this was a more indirect [oblique] way for me to address political issues. Not politics as such, as it’s practiced by politicians, but to address social situations that would provoke a politics’ (ibid., 2004, p. 247). Here Genet proposes a clean separation between the politics of his theatre and the politics of politicians. His theatre may well take situations that ‘politics as such’ can recognize and act upon (in so far as these situations can ‘provoke a politics’), but it is of a different order. It is precisely for the reason of alterity that Genet, in his preface to The Maids, denied any political intention in or behind the play. The same reason prompted his assertion that it was the responsibility of trade unions, not his, to deal with the working conditions of maids (2002, p. 127)—an opaque piece of rhetoric clarified only some 35 years later by the 1983 interview That he saw the theatre and sociopolitical reality as dichotomous was stated unambiguously when he spoke of The Blacks in a 1964 interview well before the Black Panthers invited him to the United States, but nevertheless after he had stopped writing for the stage. Genet here declared that he did not believe his play could be useful to Blacks: ‘I think that action [and] the direct struggle against colonialism,


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[does] more for Blacks than a play does’ (2004, p. 13). Brecht, armed with his conviction that theatre is part and parcel of direct struggle, provides, again, the most appropriate contrast. The idea that the theatre as such is useless and, as such, is powerless for politics is the central concern of The Blacks; and the play is something of a test case for the two core questions raised at the beginning of this essay. The play’s mise en abyme, by which all elements, without exclusion, call upon each other, is so relentless that every component referring to the theatre refers, at the same time, to society. In other words, the play within the play performed on stage is not merely a tour de force of anti-realist construction. Everything in this construction conveys social meaning for which the division of the stage space into floorboards and elevated ramps is essential. The former is occupied by the group of actors acting Blacks, and the latter by those acting Whites. Their proxemic relationship signifies the social relationship between the groups, the one inferior to the other, and this is the driving force of the racist ideology on display. The ‘clown show’, which is performed for the onstage, ‘white’ audience (played by Blacks in ill-fitting ‘white’ masks), is also performed for the white audience in the theatre. This real white audience represents the social world to whose hierarchical image the stage action conforms in every respect, ranging from its figures of authority (Governor, Missionary, Judge and Queen) to its subaltern groups. The stage play’s Valet is but a minor sign of the latter, since the major figures of social subordination are the Blacks themselves. In the images within images that operate throughout is the image of perception—how Whites see Blacks, which the two groups on stage parody without remorse. The Blacks play themselves as ‘savage’, ‘bestial’ ‘cannibal’ and ‘barbaric’, for these are the colonizing stereotypes by which the Whites not only see Blacks, but through which they also dominate them by value judgement, mind-set and what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic violence’ (1992, pp. 116–49). All these mental acts conspire to control perception, and perception is embodied in the social institutions that control and reproduce social relations. In other words, everything that is ‘symbolic’ is intertwined with everything that is concrete, not least the concrete systems, channels and mechanisms that constitute institutions, including those of the State. The figures of State in The Blacks are presented as clichés that impose recognition while they wield actual power, as implied in The Balcony when the ‘Queen’ and her entourage are saluted by a beggar (2002, p. 324). The Blacks shows Genet to be aware of this intermesh, although he privileges its symbolic rather than concrete strand. The Blacks playing




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Blacks ‘blacken’ themselves, imitate the noises of the jungle (winds, trees, birds, animals) and burlesque their way of speaking the language of Whites (archaic expressions, colloquialisms, literary and courtly language). Archibald says in the final sequence: ‘We are what they want us to be. We shall therefore be it to the very end, absurdly’ (1960, p. 95). Which is all very well for throwing the image of them constructed by Whites back into their faces. However, duplication ad absurdum is nowhere near potent enough for destroying that very image precisely because the Blacks have not only adopted it (like the masks they wear), but have internalized it so deeply that they are stuck in an impasse, capable only of parody, spectacle (in the pejorative ‘to make a spectacle of oneself’) and the theatre (in the sense of ‘make-believe’ as well as ‘performance’). The theatre, in The Blacks, is a metaphor for their impotence. The only exit out of the impasse is action performed in the wings. The latter points to real violence in the real world, of which the rape and murder of a white woman and the execution of a black traitor are the most violent metaphors of all. Genet’s is a sleight of hand, a trick: The Blacks is an allegory whose complications are integral to its pretence not to be about society, while being about it all along. The mask, which is a ritual and ceremonial instrument for the various spectacles acted out in the play, is at the same time a central trope for the play’s equivocations, and for its games of hide-and-seek that never quite pin down their targets. Genet’s text is embedded in that which it derides—society. This becomes apparent through textual analysis, which confines the issue to what Lucien Goldmann calls ‘understanding’ texts (1970a, pp. 54–93). Such analysis—‘immanent’ analysis, in Goldmann’s terms—is incomplete in so far as it remains contentual and stylistic. Created works, however, are generated by socialized beings in specific time–place social contexts. And they carry the imprint of the circumstances of their production in some shape or form. It is this, the sociopolitical, economic and related conditions of their production (cultural, religious, legal) that provide the means for ‘explaining’, Goldmann argues, the full significance of artefacts, textual or otherwise. Yet ‘understanding’ and ‘explaining’ are two sides of the same dialectical process even though, methodologically speaking, they are different activities—one textual, the other contextual—that cannot happen at exactly the same moment. They move in oscillation, between text and context, and back again. But it is always the text that provides the lead for where to look for context and how to deal with it. Goldmann defines this guide, which is ‘immanent’ to texts or ‘inside’ them, as ‘structure’. These remarks concern Goldmann’s most straightforward methodological


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procedures, but omit their philosophical foundations, starting with his concept of ‘world view’. ‘World view’ comprises the collectively shared values, aspirations and attitudes identified in a given work or body of works (1964, p. 15). It defines immanent structures, differently, but can only do so because it exists empirically and experientially in the way that particular social groups work, live and behave in relation to each other. Put differently, this means that ‘world view’ as a textual phenomenon has its societal correlative—a relationship Goldmann terms a ‘homology of structures’ (1970a, pp. 54–93)—through which text and context can be linked. Goldmann’s conceptual framework, although fruitful in his study of Racine in The Hidden God, is less successful when it comes to grasping Genet’s work. His general essay on Genet (1970b) fails to engage such richer components of his theory as ‘world view’. And his attempt to come to grips with the opening dialogue of The Blacks (1970c) is unsatisfactory, since it is restricted to content at the expense of the aesthetic organization that, Goldmann maintains, distinguishes a creative work. It is intriguing to observe Goldmann turning to his contemporary, who, moreover, shared his interest in the structures of writing—this in a period which saw the development of structuralism. However, Goldmann’s lack of success with Genet’s theatre is due to the fact that he defines ‘world view’ as a collective view. It is not an individual point of view, and not operative methodologically, according to his theory, if taken to be such. Genet’s is a solitary position, a deliberate rejection of group sentiments, values and goals, which characterize ‘world view’. And this means that ‘world view’ is not operational in his case (although I have tentatively suggested elsewhere that Genet’s drama may project the sentiments, and so on, of an underclass (Shevtsova, 1983, p. 187)). Nor can the concept function for Genet, as needs to be confirmed now, given the details of his socio-biography. He experienced social life as a loner, an outsider and an outcast; as a thief criminalized by his homosexuality. This shaped his hatred of France, a feeling he cared not to hide (see, particularly, Genet’s comments in a public debate organized by the Black Panthers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 (2004, p. 28)). Some of Genet’s hatred had undoubtedly found a voice in The Blacks, and it must surely have sensitized him to the hatred in others. Thus, not surprisingly, he declared that he felt immediately close to the Black Panthers because of ‘their hatred for the white world’ and their ‘concern to destroy a society’ (ibid., p. 42). Further, not only had he been isolated from social life from about the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s, largely because of intermittent incarceration and his




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vagabond existence, but he had also been alienated from it. This estrangement fed his individualism. It also helped to form his political anarchism, which is anything but collectively binding; nor does it foster a collective view. Genet’s sympathy with the Black Panthers and, later, with the Palestinians, did not make it an ideological commitment, even in individualistic or politically anarchic terms. And, in any case, given the hiatus between the gestation of The Blacks and Genet’s entry, in his own words, into ‘the real world, [only] with these two revolutionary movements, the Black Panthers and the Palestinians’ (ibid., p. 239), it would be impossible to claim that the play articulated the ‘world view’ of the first of these movements. Goldmann’s conceptual tool, then, seems to serve no purpose for a sociological reading of Genet. Even so, an individual take on the world is no less social for being individual, as I have argued in another context not connected to Genet (Shevtsova, 2002). The fact that he does not easily fit into a social group does not mean, however, that he necessarily escapes contextual framing. Nor does it mean that his work was generated randomly. What it suggests is that the methodology of contextual framing, and so of the social genesis of his work, is restricted to the rather banal, but at least useful task of identifying its echoes and resonances. This is useful for The Blacks precisely because it facilitates the deciphering of a cryptic text. The text’s multiple counterfeits make it so. The compilation of counterfeits includes the play’s fake oppositions, among them the opposition between ‘onstage’ and ‘offstage’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and ‘here’ and ‘over there’. ‘Here’ appears to encompass France dominated by Whites while ‘over there’ appears to be a site of struggle— announced by Ville de Saint-Nazaire after the execution—which appears to encompass Africa. But these seeming oppositions end up in a stalemate, locked in the kaleidoscope referred to earlier where everything is an image of everything else. ‘Inside’, ‘outside’ and all possible substitutions on the same paradigm, which could include ‘France ‘ and ‘Africa’, have no issue. In this, the politics of The Blacks is a politics of defeat. On inspection, The Blacks proves to be imbued with ideas belonging to the dominant intellectual currents of the 1940s and 1950s. Its structure of dichotomies includes that of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ and ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, and this, together with its subject matter and language, points to both Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. Sartre’s antinomy of the Self and Other is a cornerstone of his existentialism, tying in his arguments on authenticity, choice and personal responsibility, among related aspects, which assume an ethnic side in La Question Juive of 1947. The Jew, according to Sartre’s thought, is not so much an ethnic category as a


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fabrication of the anti-Semite who makes the ‘Jew’. The Jew who adopts the negative construction of his/her otherness slides into inauthenticity. No writer influenced Fanon as much as Sartre, as is well known, but the ethnic dimension of Sartre’s existentialism is particularly relevant to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks originally published in 1952. The Blacks, moreover, picks up the same thread. Its language may be counterfeit and a carnivalesque inversion of Sartre and Fanon, but it throws up some of their major concerns, just the same. This language continually demonstrates its inauthenticity. It is borrowed by Blacks from Whites, the former renouncing their blackness to adopt a fake whiteness. The play within a play mocks other features of white culture (Chopin, cathedrals, and so on) in order to expose this culture’s potency for alienating Blacks from themselves. All this is the very condition of colonization and, in Genet’s habitually oblique manner, evokes Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon writes: Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (1993, p. 18) I have noted, earlier, the collocation of terms around the idea of ‘savagery’ in The Blacks. Although not explicitly stated, as would happen in conventional realist dialogue, the play nevertheless alludes to what Fanon openly identifies in his entire book as the fact that a colonized people who assume their inferioity, must, of necessity, appropriate the colonizer’s language and culture to show that they are human. The dichotomy here is ‘savage/ human’. Fanon is steeped in a dialogue with Negritude, as developed by Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire in the 1930s not only for their own territories (Senghor for Senegal, Césaire for Martinique), but for Africa and the African diaspora. Negritude, apart from being a philosophy of ethnic and cultural distinction, can also be seen as the ideological expression of the political movements for independence taking root in Africa in the 1930s. This view can be defended even though Negritude was not formulated by the colonized in the colonies, but in metropolitan France by intellectuals who, like Fanon, had been formed by the country’s elite educational institutions. Thus trained, these intellectuals




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were in a strong position to measure the processes of social coercion. At the same time, they recognized that coercion brought the kind of empowerment that comes from the acquisition of skills and the appropriation of the linguistic-cultural modes of those who coerce. Fanon took a more radical stance than Senghor or Césaire, denouncing the dual process of coercion and empowerment as one and the same thing: the destruction of ‘local cultural originality’, which is integral to the ‘whitening’ of ‘colonized people’. It is this standpoint, precisely, that appears in The Blacks, for all its aesthetics of mise en abyme. By 1960, most of the countries in French West Africa, stimulated by the revolution and civil war in Algeria and France’s defeat in Indochina in 1954, had won independence (Upper Volta, Senegal, Togo, Chad). It is difficult to assess the influence of Negritude, as well as Fanon’s debate with it, on the independence movements. None of the turmoil of the period would have escaped Genet, not least because he was connected to Sartre (whom Genet liked), who had publicly criticized France’s role in the Algerian crisis and supported a ‘free Algeria’. France herself was in crisis, and Sartre lost no opportunity to expose the sociopolitical and moral ramifications of the situation, internally as well as externally. Arguably, Sartre’s uncompromising critique of France was taken, by Genet, to be the mirror of his own hatred. In Fanon, the true Self of the Black is usurped by the colonizer when the latter creates him/her in his own image. By being made to be Other, and by accepting fabricated otherness, the inauthentic Black is blocked ontologically, psychologically, and by race and culture, all of it denying him political power. The only alternative possible is to embrace autonomy outside the Black/White–Self/Other speculum. The Blacks appears to offer a similar solution in so far as authentic action for authentic autonomy seems to be taking place ‘over there’ not in the wings, but beyond the wings of the theatre. And yet, in a play deadlocked in counterfeits, there can be no certainty that the presumed political action ‘over there’ is anything other than a counterfeit doomed to mere ‘performance’ and thus failure. Genet, in later years, reiterated this view, albeit after the hindsight of direct experience. Or he may simply have been indulging in self-fulfilling prophecy:


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Everything the Panthers did was aimed at liberating the Blacks. … It grew weak through its rainbow fringe, its fund-raising methods, the quantity and inevitable evanescence of its TV images, its use of a rough yet moving rhetoric not backed by rigorous thought, its empty



theatricality—or theatricality tout court !—and its rapidly exhausted symbolism. (2003, p. 49)

Note

Works cited Baudrillard, J. Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I. Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993). —— The System of Objects, trans. J. Benedict (London: Verso, 1996). Bourdieu, P. with L. J. D. Wacquant. Réponses (Paris: Seuil, 1992). Fanon, F. White Skin, Black Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1993). Genet, J. The Blacks, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber,1960). —— Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). —— Prisoner of Love, trans. B. Bray (New York: New York Review Books, 2003). —— The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. A. Dichy, trans. J. Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Goldmann, L. The Hidden God, trans. P. Thody (London: Routledge, 1964). —— ‘La Sociologie de la littérature: statut et problèmes de méthode’, in Marxisme et sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1970a), pp. 54–93. —— ‘Le théâtre de Genet—Essai d’étude sociologique’, in Structures mentales et création culturelle (Paris: Anthropos, 1970b), pp. 267–302. —— ‘Microstructures dans les vingt-cinq premières répliques des Nègres de Jean Genet’, in Structures mentales et création culturelle (Paris: Anthropos, 1970c), pp. 303–25. Sartre, J-P. La Question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Shevtsova, M. ‘Social Actors/Stage Actors: Jean Genet and the Sociology of the Theatre’, in Words and Worlds: Studies in the Social Role of Verbal Culture, eds, S. Knight and S. N. Mukherjee (Sydney: Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, 1983), pp. 163–87. —— ‘Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu’s Champ and Habitus for a Sociology of Stage Productions’, The Sociology of the Theatre, eds, M. Shevtsova and D. Urian, focus issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, 12: 3 (2002), 35–66.


1. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated in Works cited.





Part II


Politics and Performance





4 Genet’s The Screens as Media Allegory

While the Algerian War and the question of decolonization furnish the obvious political referents for Jean Genet’s The Screens, there is a hidden politics at work in the text, which is focused on mass media technology and consumerism. In order to explore this important, though neglected, relationship, this essay rethinks Genet’s final play in the social and historical context of a post-war France grappling with the twin forces of decolonization and rapid modernization. The swift rise of consumer culture in France during the 1950s and 1960s, as Kristin Ross argues (1995), constituted a concerted attempt to cleanse the ‘stain’ of Algeria from French national consciousness. The proliferation of inexpensive consumables and durable goods, along with the emergence of new forms of mass media, helped France to forget the loss of its colonial empire and the especially horrendous episode of the Algerian War. While The Screens is not a political play in any simple sense, as Genet himself stressed in numerous comments, to divorce it from the specific context in which it was created and first performed obscures Genet’s particular notion of the political, and his unique conception of ‘political’ theatre. The furore raised by the first French production in 1966—violent protests in the theatre and on the streets; heated debates in the French media and the National Assembly—suggest a need to re-examine the play beyond abstract themes such as identity, language or representation. The challenge, then, is to understand The Screens as somehow suspended between political engagement and philosophical detachment. Neither overt propaganda nor mere aestheticism, the play ‘performs’ the isolation of subjects living in an age of war and spectacle, and offers an allegory for the role of mass media communication in an era of mass consumption. It assumes its full meaning in the confluence of these two versions of allegory, where history as catastrophe meets the commodity fetish.


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David Fieni

To understand the kind of allegory enacted in The Screens and how such an allegory might relate to mass media technology and disposable culture, I revisit briefly Walter Benjamin’s work on the Trauerspiel— German tragic drama, or ‘mourning play’—and his later writings on Baudelaire. A notoriously polysemous and dynamic term, Benjamin’s ‘allegory’ is neither simply a mode of artistic expression, nor a theory of language; rather, it is a way of conceiving history and reality as an accumulation of ruins or fragments, isolated from each other, and thus closed off from the possibility of transcendent meaning. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin reconfigures the supposed weakness of German baroque drama into both a model for his own particular notion of allegory, and, in a more ambitious sense, as a figure for western modernity in general. The Trauerspiel failed, contends Benjamin because the characters lacked depth, and were caught in the ‘fixed schema’ of an allegorical theatre whose artifice was all too apparent, especially when compared with the more psychological and mimetic theatre of the Renaissance (Benjamin, 1998, pp. 98, 184, 191). Benjamin’s text, however, claims an ambivalent victory for this neglected genre, since, ‘in the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well-preserved they are’ (ibid., p. 235). In other words, beneath the fragmentary, random, and overtly artificial signs on the stage of the Trauerspiel, Benjamin discerns grand concepts, namely artifice and fragmentation themselves. ‘In [Benjamin’s notion of] allegory’, writes Jim Hansen, ‘material form itself, which is always moribund, can never reconcile with the transcendental ideal, can never be permanent. Rather, it is a marker of impermanence and loss’ (2004, p. 674). For Benjamin, an allegory is opposed to a symbol because a symbol bears an apparently organic relationality with its referent, whilst an allegory is composed of deliberately artificial material signs that fragment, oppose and/or replace the original referent. This concept of allegory as ruin that Benjamin first derives from baroque drama, and which Hansen calls the ‘moribund’ loss of transcendent meaning, finds its nineteenth-century counterpart, according to Benjamin, in Baudelaire’s works, where the process of allegorical signification resembles the process of commodification. In Baudelaire’s Paris, allegory as commodity comes to mean ‘tearing things out of the context of their usual interrelations’ (Benjamin, 1985, p. 41). The link between such conceptions of allegory and commodification for a reading of The Screens lies in Genet’s use of the ‘material forms’ of theatre as media which effect the disappearance of his characters. The visual prominence of screens used throughout the play, the crucial role


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they perform in the stage action, as well as the play’s title, all suggest, as Marshal McLuhan would put it, that the play’s medium is its message (1964). Also important in this context is the way in which the dramatic media—thick make-up, plastic prostheses, padding, screens, poetically opaque language—appear to enact the very message of the play: the subordination of living beings to commodified objects and spectacular images. Genet’s stage directions indicate carefully how the screens, and what they depict, should be. They are to be approximately three meters high, and equipped with rubber wheels so they can be moved in ‘absolute silence’ (Genet, 1962, p. 10). In the commentary on Tableau One, the directions are explicit, as the intended stage props undergo an almost fantastical metamorphosis: The screen, which comes from the right towards the left, should be very lightweight, very flexible, so that the stagehand may play it like an accordion: in other words, either pulling to make it wider, jerking it abruptly, or moving it some other way, according to his fancy. Indeed, he must feel that he is a real actor, if he wants to animate the set. (2000, p. 25)1 Especially striking is the degree to which this apparently simple relationship between stagehand and screen resembles the complex relationship between contemporary society and the elements of its domestic decor, as discussed by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects—a text whose publication in 1968 is roughly contemporaneous with the French premiere of The Screens in 1966. Genet’s screens, like Baudrillard’s modern furnishings, are mobile and flexible. Instead of reflecting the subject, they work to codify her/his identity so that it becomes a product of the very system which s/he has been compelled to arrange and manipulate in the first place (Baudrillard, 1996, pp. 24–29). The objects bear the meaning; not the individual. In Genet’s play, the human presence behind the vivid and mobile prominence of the screens becomes both subordinated to, and erased by, stage furniture. However, while for Baudrillard this preoccupation with ordering turns the modern subject into a ‘mental hypochondriac … obsessed with the absolute circulation of messages’ (ibid., p. 29), Genet injects the seemingly mundane task of moving stage scenery with the pathos of a rather tender—if somewhat pathological— pas de deux performed between stagehand and screen. The stagehand, ‘according to his fancy’, both dances with, and draws a kind of silent music from, the screen which makes him invisible.


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Along with the innovative use of the screens themselves, The Screens exploits traditionally theatrical media such as cosmetics, and more technologically modern devices like plastic prostheses. Genet remarks that in addition to ‘excessive make-up’, the actors should wear fake chins and noses, a process which should be facilitated by the ‘thousands of new plastics that can be used in presenting plays nowadays’ (1962, p. 10). ‘No face should retain the conventional beauty of feature which is played up all too often on both stage and screen’, he explains (ibid., p. 10). Numerous instances in the play exist where personal ornamentation and make-up serve to mark the site of human absence or decay. In his commentary on Tableau Eleven, Genet claims that ‘each character is only a wound disappearing beneath ornaments and appearing through them’ (2000, p. 141). Warda, in Tableau Two, takes this image a step further, as she declares when missing one of her bracelets that she is like a ‘coffin missing a hammer stroke’ (ibid., p. 28). The actor playing Warda, whose body is practically replaced by accoutrements and make-up, only becomes visible through her movements within the constrained area prescribed by Genet’s stage directions. Genet instructs that the actors’ movements must be ‘extremely precise’ and ‘very taut’, and should include no ‘useless gestures’ (1962, p. 10). And the poetic figure of the unfinished coffin metonymically inscribes Warda as its mute contents. Genet’s distrust of ‘conventional beauty’ goes to the very heart of the Baudrillardian concept of appearance as something that both erases the human and points to its absence. To understand the relationship between medium of the screen in the play and plastic and cosmetics, I turn, once again, to Baudrillard, principally his argument in The Consumer Society. In that text, Baudrillard contends that mass media technology functions like make-up on the face. The process operates through ‘a systematic substitution of the real but disparate features [of the face] by a network of abstract, but coherent messages, using technical elements and a code of imposed meanings’ (‘the beauty code’)’ (1998, pp. 132–5). This code functions in the same way as the code of ‘conventional beauty’ which Genet criticizes as being all too commonly used in theatrical casting practices (1962, p. 10). Both codes filter the real features of the human face through, as Baudrillard states, ‘an entire industrial production line’ of substitutions, turning the face into a simulacrum of a face, and most importantly, into a consumable item (1998, p. 134). With the emphasis in The Screens on heavily exaggerated make-up and prosthetic features, Genet draws attention to, and subverts, this code by revealing and exaggerating the artificial process by which it functions.


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In addition, the play’s cosmetics and costume design reveal the ‘race code’ which organizes the Algerians and the French into stereotyped caricatures: the Arab characters are to wear ‘swarthy’ masks and ‘very curly, oakum wigs’ (Genet, 1962, p. 10), and the European characters are depicted as outlandish caricatures of colonialist power, wearing 30 centimetre high heels, sporting thick moustaches, and large ginger freckles (ibid., pp. 29–30; 2000, p. 47). The Screens exaggerates, and thereby satirizes the arbitrary social meanings attached to each of these individual visual cues. A theoretical link can be drawn between the visual technology of make-up that ‘filters’ the ‘real features’ of the face, and visual media that ‘filter’ the ‘raw events’ of the Algerian War, since both systems manufacture representable and consumable commodities. Such a link reveals the unexpected ways in which Genet grafts together aesthetics and politics. The other instance in which Genet mentions plastic in the play carries equally potent political and sociological inflections. In Tableau Nine, Leïla lovingly pulls objects out from under her skirt (cheese grater, lamp, glass). She resorts to drawing the final object—a stolen clock, which she maternally calls ‘her latest little one’ (1962, p. 61)—on the screen by means of a charcoal pencil. When The Mother asks her if it is made of ‘marble or galalite’, Leïla proudly replies, ‘Galalite’ (2000, p. 97). Galalithe—the trademark for the first plastic manufactured from casein (a chemical by-product derived from curdled milk, hence gala meaning ‘milk’, and lithe meaning ‘stone’)—serves as a badge of honour for Leïla: she asserts ‘with pride’ that the clock is plastic. When the Gendarme comes to arrest her for the theft of the clock, she begs him to assault her. But the Gendarme refuses, thus demonstrating his protest against Leïla’s affection for plastic: THE GENDARME: You know very well we can’t treat you the way we used to. (A little disconcerted.) We want to be humane [humain], I’m one of those who wants to be humane [humain], but it’s you who look for trouble. About the clock, we’ll discuss it up there with the sergeant. It’s imitation marble, or it’s real marble, you can bet it’s imitation. The stuff that’s sold in villages and at fairs and markets nowadays! Nothing’s like it used to be. (1962, p. 66)



If this passage is considered in terms of the function of plastic as medium, and its use as the material de choix of disposable culture, new readings of The Screens come to light. The Gendarme explains that the same ritual that has just taken place between him and Leïla and The


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Mother—the interrogation regarding the material constitution of the clock—will also form part of Leïla’s questioning at police headquarters. He suggests that Leïla’s guilt will depend on the constitution of the clock—on whether or not the clock is marble or plastic. While the scene implies that she is indeed guilty of theft in either case, the material authenticity of the clock is what is really at stake. The Gendarme thus displaces what would seem to be the obvious fear—the imminent anticolonial revolt—with the fear of a world swiftly becoming a simulacrum, a copy of a copy, in this case, a drawn copy of a plastic copy of a clock. Discussion of the clock’s materiality indicates the growing contrast between an old world of ‘human’, organic relationships between people and things, and a new world of disposable plastic tack to which Leïla has become attached. The Gendarme applies the same phrase to Leïla’s metamorphosis (‘we can’t treat you the way we used to’) as he does to the ‘plasticization’ of the contemporary world (‘Nothing’s like it used to be’), suggesting that both Leïla and the world have crossed a similar line. Such a reading displaces the more obvious connotations of the Gendarme’s assertion that ‘we can’t treat you as we used to’, which would simply imply that since the anti-colonial uprising, it is no longer so easy to abuse members of the indigenous population. By having Leïla willingly submit herself to the expected punishment of colonial authority, Genet shows how consumer culture takes her beyond the dialectic of colonizer and colonized. The transformation of objects brings with it a transformation of social roles, and the world of plastic goods and pliable media is what provides Leïla with the power to slide between the social roles expected of her. Hers is a politics of plasticity. This identification with plastic allows Leïla to affirm the modern world, a world in which everything is changeable, including the subordinated status of colonies such as Algeria. By contrast, the Gendarme’s desire to be ‘human’ can be read as a desire to be mirrored in his surroundings, to be grounded in authenticity and stability. His complaint echoes that of Baudrillard, who also voices regret at the loss of the mimetic function of domestic objects (1996, pp. 24–9), as the nonhuman order of sectional sofas and track-lighting has replaced the old ‘human’ order of grandiose mantle clocks (‘pendules’ (ibid., p. 24)) and large mirrors. Both Baudrillard and the Gendarme, however, recognize that since the proliferation of plastic consumables, the phenomenon of being reflected in one’s surroundings is no longer possible. Taken out of the context of the domestic interior, as Benjamin says the allegory is taken out of the context of its interrelations, the clock no longer serves any real function, such as that of regulating what


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Baudrillard calls the ‘internal heartbeat’ of the home as human body (ibid.). Instead, it becomes both an allegory of an inauthentic world, and a commodity in itself. Placed back into the political context of the Algerian anti-colonial struggle, the drawn copy of a plastic copy of a marble clock signifies inauthenticity. In contrast with the other ‘real objects’ that Leila takes from under her skirt, the image of the clock on the screen takes on an added sense of unreality, which is only made more acute when the audience hears chimes coming from the drawing (Genet, 1962, p. 67). The discussion of the clock’s material constitution shifts attention away from its illusory status as a drawing on a screen. The screen thus makes possible the superfluous interrogation into the clock’s authenticity: no one questions the reality of the clock. The screens, the use of plastics in the play’s stagecraft, and the typically opaque language used by the characters (for example, the analogy that Warda draws between herself and a ‘coffin missing a hammer stroke’), all allow Genet to depict allegorically the absorption of objects into mediatized discourse. The play thus makes public the plasticity of meanings generated by consumer society, and strips the media it uses of any mediating function, reducing them to the artificial fragments of allegory. By highlighting the non-reflective, non-mediating materiality of the screens, the play gestures toward the emergent medium of television and its role in codifying the violence of warfare. Genet often remarked that he wanted to keep the relationship between his play and the events surrounding the war in a state of suspense.2 In as much as the war becomes apparent behind the deliberately poor disguise the play adopts, The Screens makes visible the impending fusion between television and the codified aesthetics of modern warfare. Genet’s use of screens as more than mere scenery serves as a visual allegory for the way that the mass media filter—or indeed manufacture—the public’s perceptions of war. While the text of The Screens merely hints at a connection between Genet’s conception of theatricality and television’s role in consumer society, the relationship between representation and material culture features prominently in Genet’s œuvre as a whole. Television makes an earlier appearance in The Balcony, with Madame Irma’s complex network of audio-visual surveillance devices. However, more relevant to the present essay is Genet’s posthumously published work, Prisoner of Love, in which a politics of spectacular performance, merely intimated in The Screens, becomes an explicit and recurring motif. Throughout the text, Genet discusses at length the political ramifications of mass media technologies. He also acknowledges that the illusions generated in the theatre of war are indeed ‘nothing new’ (2003, p. 8). Examples range from the film




David Fieni

depicting Israel’s 1967 victory over its Arab neighbours, made in advance by Israeli directors and edited in Los Angeles, to the rather surreal grandeur of Nasser’s televised funeral, ‘a World Cup in Oriental Funerals’ (ibid., p. 9). Genet neither simply condemns the falsity of such illusions, nor relinquishes the possibility for critiquing them. Rather, he highlights an emerging politics of the virtual image facilitated by new technologies such as television, which proliferates in a rapidly expanding global network. Genet describes how the Palestinian people and their revolution are ‘in danger of becoming unreal through rhetoric, images on screens’ (ibid., p. 317); how they are hidden behind racist stereotypes in television advertising (ibid., p. 296); and how they are portrayed negatively in, and by the international media (ibid., p. 243). Ironically, however, it is only through the images relayed via the mass media that the Palestinian struggle can make itself known. Genet goes so far as to say that the Palestinians’ ‘radiance, their very existence, derive[s]’ from the ‘negation brought about by oversimplified and untrue coverage in the media’ (ibid., p. 243). Just as screens, make-up and plastic in The Screens both erase and expose the Arab rebels, television in Prisoner of Love both conceals and reveals the existence of the Palestinian Fedayeen. Palestinians in Prisoner of Love and rebels in The Screens are only seen, or only exist, when they are replaced, obliterated or obfuscated by media. I return to Tableau Nine of The Screens, to investigate further the link between Genet’s use of media and the absence of transcendent meaning in Benjamin’s notion of allegory. The commentary on this tableau contains some of Genet’s most telling remarks on his overall aesthetic: The actors, when performing—but what I write goes for the entire play—must try to turn in on themselves, to be ‘absent to the house’ as one is ‘absent to the world’ … even more than elsewhere, in this scene the actors must not ‘play to the audience’. But during the entire play the ‘absence to the house’ must be felt, must be almost offensive to the audience. (2000, p. 105)


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It is easy to see in such assertions the source of Georges Bataille’s famous criticism that Genet’s artistic failure is his ‘failure to communicate’ (1973, p. 169). I argue, however, that the failure of communication inherent in Genet’s theatrical aesthetic might be located at the very source of modernity and the modern theatre which Benjamin finds in the Trauerspiel. Genet’s requirements that the actors be ‘absent from the house’ and not ‘play to the audience’ correspond closely to one of the



key elements that, for Benjamin, distinguishes the Trauerspiel from traditional tragedy:

Where tragedy, for Benjamin, transcends both the spectator and the theatre to refer to a recognizable real world, the Trauerspiel, conversely, only signifies for the spectator within the immanent circuit of his or her ability to make sense of the visible surfaces represented on stage. This relationship between actor and audience described by Benjamin bears a striking resemblance to Genet’s commentary. In two letters from 1959, Genet makes explicit the actor–audience relationship he wants his play to generate. In a letter to Roger Blin he writes, ‘the action must be fairly evasive—but not blurred!—so that the spectator is left facing only himself’ (quoted in Dichy, 1991, p. 12). His emphasis is even stronger in a letter to Bernard Frechtman: ‘From the first scene, it will be necessary for the entire play to be absolutely, totally, played out in the spectator’s mind. That the spectator might enter a meeting with himself, and not with external peripeteia’ (ibid., p. 25; original italics). The disjunction between actor and spectator here echoes the disjunction between subjects in a society organized by the laws of consumption and spectacle. All three cases are marked by the highly mediatized, ‘inorganic’, ‘unnatural’ relationship between human and human; human and object; object and sign. In his reading of Benjaminian allegory, Samuel Weber asserts that ‘German Baroque allegory assumes the emptiness of the world in which it finds itself by re-enacting it, but also by parodying it’. Weber continues, ‘The allegorist does not simply empty things of their intrinsic substance and essence, he also invests them with new life and meaning, albeit as part of a masquerade, a spectacle’ (1991, p. 497). In a manner that echoes Benjamin’s notion of allegory, Genet’s play makes the impossibility of communication signify: the play ‘performs’ its message rather than simply stating or declaring it. Meaning is no more than an elaborate play of surfaces, textures and ‘new materials’, all of which are complicit with the way in which consumer society communicates its messages. The Screens transposes this failure—the severing of a transcendent relationship between the subject and the world—onto the new media of plastics and lightweight, mobile stage props. Genet’s innovative use of


The spectator of tragedy is summoned, and is justified, by the tragedy itself; the Trauerspiel, in contrast, has to be understood from the point of view of the onlooker. He learns how, on the stage, a space which belongs to an inner world of feeling and bears no relationship to the cosmos, situations are compellingly presented to him. (1998, p. 119)


David Fieni

these media helps to erect what Bataille saw in Genet’s fiction as the ‘glassy barrier … maintained between the reader and the author that leaves both cold in the end’ (1973, p. 170). The direct access to the actors that Genet denies his spectators, turns both stage and auditorium into separate and non-communicating spectacles. Yet, despite the similarities between Genet’s screens and television screens, the medium of live theatre as a site of social ritual differentiates itself clearly from the medium of television as a ritual performed in isolation. Writing in 1970, Baudrillard describes how ‘the TV image, like an inverted window, opens first onto a room, and in this room the cruel exteriority of the world makes itself warm and intimate, but with a rather perverse warmth’ (1998, p. 24). The Screens, as I have tried to demonstrate, functions much in the same way as the aesthetic ‘screening’ of violence on television. However, it must be understood as a spectacle that resists the realm of the spectacular by drawing attention to the impossibility of representing the brutality of war in easily digestible, ‘warm and intimate’ images. The play’s hyperbolic artifice and highly formal style of performance allow Genet to reveal the mechanisms of commodification and to serve up its violence cold.

Notes 1. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated in Works cited. 2. In his letters to Roger Blin, and in tableau commentaries, Genet asserts the play’s semi-autonomy from the Algerian War. Notably, in the commentary to Tableau Thirteen, he writes, ‘the historical reality [of the play] must only manifest itself in a distant, nearly erased manner’ (2000, p. 193). However, in 1970 at a rally for the Black Panthers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he offered a more straightforward assessment of the play’s relationship to historical reality, telling the crowd that it is ‘nothing but a long meditation on the Algerian War’ (2004, p. 28). In these comments, Genet both reveals his intention to represent the war, and deliberately confuses the time-frame of the stage action.

Works cited


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Bataille, G. Literature and Evil, trans. A. Hamilton (New York: Urizen Books, 1973). Baudrillard, J. The System of Objects, trans. J. Benedict (London: Verso, 1996). —— The Consumer Society, trans. C. Turner (London: Sage, 1998). Benjamin, W. ‘Central Park’, trans. L. Spencer, New German Critique, 34 (1985), 32–58. —— The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osbourne (London: Verso, 1998). Dichy, A. and L. Bellity Peskine (eds). La Bataille des Paravents (Paris: Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, 1991).


Genet, J. The Screens, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1962). —— Les Paravents, ed. M. Corvin (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 2000). —— Prisoner of Love, trans. B. Bray (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003). —— The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. A. Dichy, trans. J. Dort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Hansen, J. ‘Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the function of Allegory’, New Literary History, 35: 4 (2004), 663–83. McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Ross, K. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Weber, S. ‘Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth, and Allegory in Benjamin’s The Origin of the German Mourning Play’, Modern Language Notes, 106: 3 (1991), 465–500.




5 Carl Lavery

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Jean Genet’s small body of work dating from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s—The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens—is one of the most politically astute theatre5 that we possess. Unlike the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, Genet’s earliest biographer, and, to a certain extent, those of Bertolt Brecht, a playwright whose work he detested, Genet’s influence has grown to the point where he is now considered, by some, as the most politically sophisticated dramatist of his generation.1 According to Marie Redonnet, for instance, ‘Genet is very much our contemporary. He’s the only one who saw with lucidity what the new face of the enemy would look like’ (2000, p. 156).2 Redonnet is not alone in her claims. In a recent article, Rustom Bharucha argues that the geo-political tensions produced by 11 September 2001 have finally disclosed the profound political significance of Genet’s theatre: [T]o process [Genet’s] radical insights into our own practice today … we have to find the courage to betray him imaginatively, not to disprove his politics and reject its anarchist affinities, but rather to test these affinities within the interruptions of the ‘real’ in the global terror of our times. Genet challenges us to spell out our politics in relation to where he stands. (2003, p. 24)


Reading The Blacks through the 1956 Preface: Politics and Betrayal

Redonnet’s and Bharucha’s observations are ostensibly based on three aspects of Genet’s theatre. First, its critique of the conservativism inherent in national-liberation movements in Africa and the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s; second, its suspicions about the effectiveness of committed art; and third, its preference for raising uncomfortable questions rather than providing simple solutions. This last point is particularly 68


important to Bharucha. According to him, the political potential of Genet’s theatre is found in its anarchic refusal to side with any form of established social order. By breaking with the ‘false sentimentality’ of community, Genet, claims Bharucha, ‘articulate[s] a new risk-taking in performance’ and allows spectators to ‘open [themselves] to new alliances that challenge the comfort of old solidarities’ (ibid., p. 27). In this way, he offers, Bharucha believes, the possibility of transcending the ‘terror of the times’ which are increasingly based on essentialized notions of collective identity. While there is much to admire in the readings of Bharucha and Redonnet, it is strange that they should refuse to negotiate with Genet’s difficult (and, at times, contradictory) theory of political performance.3 Although Bharucha and Redonnet would surely respond that Genet’s personal endorsement does not harm the validity of their insights, their silence is problematic. Not only does their attempt to ‘read against the grain’ overlook Genet’s sophisticated brand of political theatre, but it leaves the field open for right-wing critics who, for the lack of any evidence to the contrary, continue to argue that his drama is nihilistic, fascistic and anti-Semitic.4 As a way, then, of basing the study of Genet’s politics of theatre on solid foundations, it seems important to return to empirical sources.5 The 1956 ‘Preface to The Blacks’ has an absolutely vital role to play in this project. For, as Michel Corvin points out, this text is ‘absolutely unique in [Genet’s] critical writing because of its length, seriousness, rigour, and the clarity and lucidity with which he reflects on his own political engagement’ (2002, p. 1329). To a certain extent, the failure of critics to cite the 1956 ‘Preface to The Blacks’ is understandable,6 for although the text was written between 1955 and 1956, it did not appear in full-length form until 2002 when it was finally published in Michel Corvin’s and Albert Dichy’s edited volume Jean Genet: Théâtre complet.7 Despite its obscurity, ‘The Preface to The Blacks’ nevertheless provides privileged access to Genet’s unorthodox model of political theatre. For Genet, the notion of political theatre was neither straightforward nor self-evident. To be effective, political art needed to find a way of catching the audience off-guard. As was so often the case in Genet’s work and life, betrayal was his favoured technique for subverting expectations.8 For the rest of this essay, I will endeavour to explore how, in the ‘Preface to The Blacks’, betrayal transcends its usual negative sense and exists as a positive and progressive principle. Or, to express this differently: betrayal is what allows us to approach what, for me, is the defining feature of Genet’s concept of political performance as it relates to The Blacks: the attempt to combine a concern


Reading The Blacks through the 1956 Preface 69


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Towards the end of last December [1954], Raymond Rouleau told me that he wanted to create a black acting company. I didn’t know what his motives were. To tell the truth … I thought he wanted to exploit the actors, seeing them primarily as a novelty act for European audiences. When he asked me to write a play for the company, I accepted. … ‘Yes’, I said to myself, ‘the Blacks will go on stage. But I’ll organize a spectacle that will be a trap for the spectators.’ (2002, p. 836) Reflecting on the process behind the work, Genet explains that the eventual ‘point of departure’ for his play was provided by an eighteenthcentury ‘musical box’, on which four ‘negro valets were bowing in front of a small, white porcelain princess’ (ibid., p. 839). The mention of the word ‘valet’ is vital in this context: it establishes an immediate and intimate relationship between black identity and performance. According to Genet, it is impossible to write a naturalistic play for black actors in the West, since, he argues, black experience in a colonized society is inherently theatricalized. In a language that owes much to the existential vocabulary used by early anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, Genet claims that the colonized subject is forced to adopt an identity which s/he has not forged herself/himself. In other words, the colonized Black is, and can only ever be, a performer, an actor who, in order to survive, has to identify with a pre-established set of characteristics and stereotypical roles: ‘I’m not saying that Blacks are natural actors; on the contrary, they become actors as soon as they encounter the white gaze. They will remain actors as long as we, the white spectators, observe them before seeing them and think about them in terms of [stereotypical] categories’ (ibid., p. 840). Genet’s response to the ontological predicament confronting the black subject is to write a play that deliberately betrays the living reality of black experience by presenting it as it appears in white culture: that is to say, as something fake, performative and clichéd. According to Genet, the fact that he is constrained to write in French, the language of domination and oppression, disqualifies any authentic representation of black identity. In French, as in English, the meaning of blackness has


for alterity (respecting the otherness of the other) with a desire for concrete action in performance. In the ‘Preface to The Blacks’, Genet is sensitive to—perhaps even obsessed by—issues of representation. Discussing the background to The Blacks, he is at pains to point out that it was not his idea to write a play about black experience: he was commissioned to do it:



been decided upon in advance. Discourse has colonized experience:

From this perspective, Genet’s betrayal of his black collaborators in the play is not an expression of some deep-seated nihilism on his part; on the contrary, it is an attempt to protect the alterity or otherness of black experience, a quest to negate the negation of a racist world. Importantly, though, the extreme ‘cruelty’ of The Blacks is intended to work dialectically: ‘Let’s not speak too badly of evil, or rather cruelty … for, more effectively than a well-meaning intention, it can be at the origin of a generous work of art’ (ibid., p. 843). Genet’s interest in what we might call a ‘betrayal of betrayal’ is caused by his vociferous rejection of liberal theories of artistic commitment which, he claims, let white society off the hook. In Genet’s view, political art that celebrates black experience in a colonized society misses the point. Instead of accusing the oppressor and/or ‘inciting’ the oppressed to ‘actively revolt’ (ibid., p. 837), it merely shows that racism has not altered the life-affirming joy of the black population, and thus was not so bad after all. This line of thinking accounts for Genet’s angry attack in the ‘Preface to The Blacks’ on Katherine Dunham’s Afro-Cuban ballets of the 1950s, which, for him, are decidedly disingenuous and hypocritical: Where did [Dunham get her Blacks]? Whose ambassadors were they? What sovereign empire did they represent? Pale, discoloured, they emanated from an unearthly and unreal world, a world without roots, without suffering, without tears. … Not from them would we ever know the pain of a black world. … No sense of its rage, misery, anger or fear would ever be communicated. … On the contrary, everything in [these performances] sang about what is called the joy of life and consoled us … by telling us that nothing could profoundly wound the Blacks, since their joy was so great. (ibid., p. 836; modified)


The figures that surge out of this language, can they be anything other than the onstage projections of phantoms in whose ghostly image I wanted to transform real Blacks? This play is written in a bourgeois world. It indicates what that world has obtained from a race that has been put in contact with it. (ibid., p. 841)

Rather than liberating the black performer as they claim to do, performances like Dunham’s merely satisfy their own desire for a clear conscience. For Genet, white liberal artists are profoundly disingenuous


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in their attempts to show to ‘hostile or indifferent Whites that a [Black] is “a man just like another” ’ ( ibid., p. 837). Not only does this humanist mode of performance transform the black actor into a slave (a performer for Whites), but it allows the white liberal artist to absolve herself/himself of all racial responsibility, since s/he erroneously thinks that s/he has made a stand on behalf of the oppressed: ‘To want to write for Blacks could only be motivated by that form of moral abjection, which consists in leaning forward generously, with comprehension, towards the weak, in an attempt to clear one’s conscience and to absolve oneself from any type of effective action’ (ibid., p. 838). If the black population is to express itself, Genet argues that it needs to produce its own revolutionary writers, artists and spokespeople. For him, the task facing white writers is completely different: they need to betray their own culture: Minorities need to conquer their own freedoms. [As white writers] we need to mistrust our enthusiasm for noble causes: it quickly becomes an attitude of ethical self-satisfaction. … I am not saying that we should systematically refuse to support the oppressed, but that it would be useless if, at the same time, we did not betray the dominant society which we are a part of: We have to betray ourselves. (ibid.) Genet’s quest to betray himself—and by extension, western culture— accounts for his reluctance to speak positively on behalf of the black population in The Blacks. For while he knows how to speak to an individual Black, he has no idea how to address the black community as a collective body: Faced with them [the black population], I would have the painful sense that Whiteness was trying to speak to Negritude. You would have to be either a madman or a coward to accept such a dialogue. … And anyway, to speak to them in this way would mean nothing; where could I find the depth of emotion necessary to express the myth that would ignite them? (ibid., p. 835)


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Like later post-colonial theorists such as Edward Said (1995), Genet realizes that to speak for someone invariably negates his/her difference and perpetuates colonialism in a new, more insidious form. In order to circumvent the dangerous hypocrisy of the liberal aesthetic, Genet insists that his ‘play is not written for Blacks but against Whites’ (ibid., p. 842; original italics). Genet’s hyper-awareness makes the objections


raised by black writers and academics in the United States during the New York premiere of the play in 1961 appear hopelessly naïve. Genet is not interested, as Ossie Davis and Lorraine Hansberry claimed (see Chapter 10 by Warrick in this volume), in using black experience as a pretext for his own ends. On the contrary, he used his experience as an outsider to further black ends, a pattern he repeated in the 1970s when he exploited his celebrity status to support the Black Panthers and Angela Davis. Given Genet’s sensitivity to the danger or leurre of representation, it comes as little surprise to find deconstructionist readers such as Laura Oswald (1989) and Hedi Khélil (2001) arguing that the political significance of The Blacks stems from its capacity to represent blackness as a mythology, a mere nexus of signs. According to this interpretation, Genet is primarily a playwright of resistance, a dramatist whose political value resides in his ability to disrupt language and to destabilize essentialist notions of racial identity. While this deconstructionist interpretation of Genet’s work certainly has currency, it nevertheless fails to address the more active and affirmative impulse inherent in his theory of political performance. A closer reading of the ‘Preface to The Blacks’ shows that Genet is not simply interested in suspending identity; his real goal is to change identity by provoking a sudden transformation of the world in the spectator’s consciousness. Crucially, this is to be achieved experientially through the ‘poetry’ of theatre:9 Theatrical expression is not a discourse. It does not address itself to man’s rational faculties. It is a poetic act that imposes itself as a categorical imperative. Confronted by such an imperative, reason, although it does not disappear altogether, has to accept its subservience. I believe it is possible to find the unique expression that all men would understand. But the metamorphoses of history, instead of leading different societies towards a greater mutual understanding, have hardened the shell of their singularity, to the point that our primary occupation has to be focused on breaking open that shell, and in the process liberating a subject, who is impatient to experience his freedom. (ibid., pp. 835–6)



In the ‘Preface to The Blacks’, Genet intends ‘to break open’ the ‘shell of singularity’ in Artaudian fashion by overwhelming the spectator with painful affect, what he refers to as ‘wounding’: I had the opportunity to wound the white audience and, by doing so, to allow doubt to enter its consciousness. To be frank about it, it


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The emphasis that Genet places on ‘wounding’ the white spectator, and on providing access to a space of mutual comprehension beyond the vagaries of history, problematizes any attempt to appropriate him as a post-structuralist playwright.10 The ‘Preface to The Blacks’ demonstrates that Genet’s theatre is too optimistic, too utopian, to insist on a simple deferral of meaning. For Genet, a theatre that ‘wounds’ has the capacity to free the subject from the prison house of language and the fetters of discourse. The instantaneous gap that the Genetian wound opens in consciousness—although painful—is intended to produce a utopian space where authentic communication can potentially take place. Accordingly, if Genet’s politics are to be fully understood, an alternative model of political and artistic engagement is required. In my view, this is best supplied by looking at a political and avant-garde movement that was in operation in Paris at the same time that Genet was writing his plays: Situationism. According to Guy Debord, Situationism’s main theorist, conventional forms of politicized art, such as Sartre’s famous theory of a ‘theatre of situations’, have little chance of transforming the world. This is because, Debord claims, they erroneously insist on separating aesthetics from everyday life. As a result of this separation, the committed artwork, continues Debord, contradicts its original purpose: instead of weakening alienation, it merely reinforces it. The spectator is positioned in a passive role, forced to consume an always already appropriated product, a spectacle. Debord’s answer to the useless passivity of Sartre’s theatre of situations is to offer a more dynamic and democratic form of spatiotemporal exchange: the actual situation. In ‘Report on the Construction of Situations’, Debord defines a situation first, as ‘the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher passionate nature’ (2002, p. 44), and second, as an event that ‘begins on the other side of the modern collapse of the idea of the theater’ (ibid., p. 47). In other words, a situation is a performance, a singular event designed to generate emotion within an everyday environment. There is no aesthetic sublimation involved in the situation. On the contrary, it is conceived as an act that dissolves the false consciousness of the spectacle, thus allowing the subject to discover the joys of the non-alienated life.


seemed to me that only a scandalous act could make the white spectators question themselves and feel anxious in front of a concrete historical problem which normally poses little disturbance to their souls. (ibid., p. 838)


Although The Blacks is intended to be staged in a theatre and not in an everyday environment (for the Situationists this should be the city itself), there is nevertheless much in common between Genet’s play and the Debordian situation.11 Like Debord, Genet is interested in a theatre that would affect the audience by collapsing rigid distinctions between art and life. In The Blacks, Genet achieves this by deliberately betraying the essence of western drama. Instead of relying on vicarious experience through the representation of an act, Genet, as Elinor Fuchs argues, develops a ‘calculated dramaturgy of the real’ (2001, p. 343), that is, a play that ‘cultivates dis-illusion’ (ibid., p. 345; original italics). Genet’s tactic for dissolving the theatricality of theatre is to write a play in which a group of onstage black actors massacre a ‘white’ court (also played by black actors) in order to conceal what is occurring offstage: the execution of a traitor by a band of concealed black militants. As the play develops, this supposedly ‘authentic’ act is revealed to be just as illusory as the pantomimic events depicted onstage. The confusing metatheatricality of Genet’s play means that it is impossible to tell if the black actors are merely miming their anger, or using the performance as a type of camouflage to express their ‘real’ hatred towards western society. As a result, the white audience in The Blacks, as Una Chaudhuri (1985) demonstrates, is unable to consume the labour of the actors as an object of entertainment. On the contrary, the spectator is put on trial, forced to witness black suffering, and accused of perpetuating white racism. By betraying the rules of theatrical divertissement, the play becomes an event, an actual encounter. The spatio-temporal dimension of theatre, the fact that it takes place in the present, is crucial to the political impact of The Blacks. By placing black bodies on a white stage and insisting that a white spectator be in the audience at all times, Genet provides a concrete example of the spatial relationship, which, the philosopher Georgio Agamben (1998) claims, embodies the very essence of politics: the agonistic tie of ‘inclusiveexclusivity’.12 In this way, Genet removes the alibi from theatrical and political experience in the West. The physical presence of black actors performing in front of a white audience—and yet being distanced from it—draws attention to the inclusive-exclusion of the former. Read in this way, Genet’s play exploits the ‘thereness’ of the performance event in order to transform vicarious experience into actual experience. The proximity of the actors, combined with their ambiguous status, disturbs the theatrical frame and induces a form of panic. In doing so, The Blacks betrays its own dramatic logic (the replacement of the thing by the sign) and becomes a situation, which, to adopt Debord’s language, starts on




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the far side of theatre. Crucially, the epistemological and ontological disturbance produced by Genet’s deliberate cultivation of doubt is where he believes the potential for authentic communication resides, since the effect of such a process of disorientation is intended to interrupt our habitual response to the world. The ‘Preface to The Blacks’ shows that Genet was deliberately attempting to develop an effective notion of political theatre that would avoid the weaknesses of both Sartrean and Brechtian models of commitment. For Genet, theatre is at its most political when it deconstructs itself and encroaches on the real. By drawing attention to the ‘theatricality … that power can never do without’ (2004, p. 131), Genet believes that theatre has the potential to overcome its vicariousness and exist as a form of actual, non-semiotic exchange. From this perspective, it is disingenuous to criticize Genet for de-realizing the ‘reality’ of the theatrical event, and/or refusing to offer a positive message. On the contrary, this is where the strategic dimension of his sophisticated theory of political performance resides. For Genet, the betrayal of theatre is both a tactic of resistance and an act of hope, an attempt to transcend ‘the vagaries of history’.

Notes 1. In an interview with the German journalist Hubert Fichte in 1975, Genet attacked Brechtian theatre on the grounds that the cigar-smoking spectator so desired by Brecht was not a revolutionary producer of meaning, but, on the contrary, a bourgeois capitalist: In his choice of a gesture, smoking a cigar, there is a casualness with regard to the work of art that is in fact not permitted. … I don’t know the Rothschilds but with [them], you can probably talk about art. You can’t go to the Louvre and look at the Marquise of Solana with the same movement as with the Rothschilds who talk about art while smoking a cigar. (2004, p. 122) 2. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated in Works cited. 3. In an interview with Playboy Magazine in 1964, for instance, Genet claimed that his plays were written ‘to crystallize a theatrical and dramatic emotion. If my plays are useful to blacks, it’s not my concern. I don’t think they are in any case’ (ibid., p. 13). 4. See Stewart and McGregor (1993), Marty (2003) and Jablonka (2004). 5. This return to Genet is not a conservative attempt to police meaning. Rather, it is an attempt to respect his heterogeneity. When critics read Genet, there is a tendency to interpret his work through an overarching discourse which, for all its claims to the contrary, has little real interest in accommodating the contradictions of his theatre. 6. Corvin’s short essay (2002) is the only existing commentary on ‘The Preface to The Blacks’ in either French or English.


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7. An abridged version of the ‘The Preface to The Blacks’ first appeared as ‘L’art est un refuge’ in Moraly (1988). Corvin and Dichy refer to the text as ‘Préface Inédite des Nègres’, which can be translated as ‘The Unpublished Preface to The Blacks’. Given that the text has now been published, I prefer to call it the 1956 ‘Preface to The Blacks’. There is no English translation of either text. 8. For related readings see Bersani (1994) and Bougon (1998). 9. For Genet, poetry is synonymous with art in general. In theatrical terms, the poetry of theatre refers to its essential qualities: namely, its ‘liveness’, the fact that it takes place in the present and occurs between bodies. 10. Mara de Gennaro makes a similar point. For her, Genet’s interest in transcending history problematizes the readings of critics committed to conceptions of ‘identity as “socially constructed” and “performed” on an on-going basis’ (2003, p. 205). 11. While Situationism is often thought to be antagonistic to any official cultural form, Debord was certainly interested in the performance practices of Brecht, Artaud and Kaprow. For a good discussion of this see Puchner (2004). 12. Inclusive-exclusivity is agonistic because the sovereign/white subject needs the sacred/black subject to exist. In other words, whiteness is unable to do without its enemy, blackness (and vice versa).

Works cited Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Bersani, Leo. ‘The Gay Outlaw’, Diacritics, 24: 2 (1994), 5–18. Bharucha, R. ‘Genet in Manila: Reclaiming the Chaos of The Times’, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, 62 (2003), 15–28. Bougon, P. ‘Translation, Tradition and Betrayal: From Political Commitment to Literary Freedom in Les Paravents (Preceded by a Reflection on What Remains of a Larousse Dictionary in Colonial Politics)’, trans. S. Marson, Parallex, 4: 2 (1998), 129–44. Chaudhuri, U. ‘The Politics of Theater: Play, Deceit and Threat in Genet’s The Blacks’, Modern Drama, 28: 3 (1985), 362–76. Corvin, M. ‘Préface inédite des Nègres: Notice’, in Jean Genet: Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 1329–32. Debord, G. ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency’, in Guy Debord and The Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. and trans. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 29–50. De Gennaro, M. ‘What Remains of Jean Genet?’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 16: 1 (2003), 190–209. Fuchs, E. ‘Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four Twentieth-Century Plays’, Modern Drama, 44: 3 (2001), 337–54. Genet, J. ‘Préface inédite des Nègres’ in Jean Genet: Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 835–43. –––– The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. A. Dichy, trans. J. Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Jablonka, I. Les Vérités inavouables de Jean Genet (Paris: Seuil, 2004).




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Khélil, H. Figures de l’altérité dans le théâtre de Jean Genet. Lecture des Nègres et des Paravents (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). Marty, E. Bref Séjour à Jérusalem (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Moraly, J-B. (ed.). ‘Les Cinq vies de Jean Genet’, in Les Nègres au Port de la Lune: Genet et les différences (Bordeaux: Editions de la Différance, 1988). Oswald, L. Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989). Puchner, M. ‘Society of the Counter-Spectacle: Debord and the Theatre of the Situationists’, Theatre Research International, 29: 1 (2004), 4–15. Redonnet, M. Jean Genet, le poète travesti : Portrait d’une œuvre (Paris: Grasset, 2000). Said, E. ‘On Genet’s Late Work’, in Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed. J. Ellen Gainor (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 230–42. Stewart, H. and R. McGregor. Jean Genet: From Fascism to Nihilism (New York: Peter Lang, 1993).


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6 Clare Finburgh

‘What is still called order, but is really physical and spiritual exhaustion, comes into existence of its own accord when what is rightly called mediocrity is in the ascendant’, writes Genet in his political and aesthetic autobiography, Prisoner of Love (1992, p. 49). Respecting norms and rules engenders a life of mediocrity. ‘Tradition? Inertia? Perhaps they’re the same’, he writes (ibid., p. 123). Preserving the status quo results in sclerotic inactivity. Genet complains in his first interview in 1964 of the human propensity towards conformity: ‘it’s very rare for us to make a conscious effort to go beyond this stupefied state’ (2004, p. 17). Genet’s entire oeuvre, conversely, constitutes a revolt against conformity. People must question the rules to which they usually subscribe. In 1983, in one of his last interviews, he describes this questioning as a life-affirming act: ‘I think that there is an affirmation of existence in the very fact of rebelling’ (ibid., pp. 251–2). The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how Genet’s rejection of mediocrity, inertia and conformity begins in his novels and early plays, notably Deathwatch, as the private revolt of individualist characters. It later, however, evolves into a social and political ethics of collective revolt. I locate this turning point in the 1950s, and highlight The Blacks as a pivotal text. My theoretical framework is constructed around the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek’s recent philosophical-political writings on the ethics of revolt, and around discussions of individualism and collectivity in Genet’s own political and fictional writings. I argue that the commitment to singularity, solitude and individuality in Genet’s early works is held in tension with, and not subsumed by, his later engagement with commonly shared causes. Genetian revolt is realized through ‘Evil’.1 In his 1964 interview, Genet explains that the subject must ‘live Evil in such a way that [it is] not


‘Micro-treatise on a Mini-politics’: Genet, Individualism and Collectivity

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recuperated by the social forces that symbolize Good’ (ibid., p. 5). Zizek’s concepts of ‘risk’ and ‘daring’ help to elucidate Genetian Evil. For Zizek, the subject must challenge the ‘big Other’, namely authority. In his writings, Zizek advocates a violent disruption to the status quo; this, he hopes, might effect political change. In a recent interview, Zizek implores, ‘Do not look for support in any form of big Other. … You must risk the act without guarantee’ (2004, p. 163). Zizek’s reference to risk is echoed in Genet’s description of the Palestinian fighters with whom he spent time in 1970: ‘When we gave up believing in a Providence that steered us by the shoulder, we had to fall back on chance’ (1992, p. 14). Without the ‘big Other’ of external authority, the Palestinians ‘risk the act without guarantee’; they ‘ “step back” from actuality into possibility’, as Zizek would say (1993, p. 2). In all his works, Genet pursues Evil: he systematically defies authority—political programmes, religious doctrines, social institutions. No system or figure is eternal, infallible, absolute. In his play Splendid’s, one gangster, Jean attempts to establish himself as chief. Another, Bob, warns, ‘You know, kings can be deposed—and decapitated’ (2002, p. 228).2 Genet displays disregard for authority in both his fictional and political writings. In an article ‘Chartres Cathedral’, originally entitled ‘Micro-Treatise on a Mini-Politics’, he writes, ‘Real fidelity is often to do the opposite of those to whom one vows fidelity’ (2004, pp. 169, 344). To avoid the sclerotic inertia implicit in allegiance and acceptance, the Genetian rebel must betray others’ expectations. Genet declares in Prisoner of Love, ‘Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all’ (1992, p. 59). Evil entails the negation of the big Other: its influence, expectation, desire. Zizek considers himself a radical, and deplores liberalism. He does not exclude violence from his pursuit of political change, and is hence sometimes labelled ‘totalitarian’, even by his close intellectual colleagues (Zizek, 2000, pp. 278, 289). In his 2001 publication Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism, Zizek defends himself against these accusations, accusing liberals themselves of colluding with totalitarianism because their challenge to power is insufficiently committed:


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What we need more is a certain violence against ourselves … you need a kind of violent outburst. … Even if it is not physical violence, it is extreme symbolic violence, and we have to accept it. At this level I think that in order to really change the existing society, this will not come about in the terms of this liberal tolerance. It will explode as a more shattering experience. And this is, I think, what is needed today: this awareness that true changes are painful. (2004, p. 121)


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The murderer compels my respect. Not only because he has known a rare experience, but because he has suddenly set himself up as a god. … I am speaking, to be sure, of the conscious, even cynical murderer, who dares take it upon himself to deal death without trying to refer his acts to some power of a given order, for the soldier who kills does not assume responsibility. (1964a, p. 131) Murder that is willed consciously by the killer, as opposed to being decreed by a big Other like the army, constitutes supreme Evil for Genet, since it is the ultimate revolt against moral, canon and statute law. Genet’s first play, Deathwatch, described by critic Marie-Claude Hubert as the ‘daughter of his novels’ (1996, p. 66), revolves around three cellmates: murderer Green Eyes, and petty criminals Lefranc and Maurice. Lefranc’s murder of Maurice is considered by many critics, and indeed by Green Eyes, to be inauthentic.3 Green Eyes claims that Lefranc willed the murder, whereas in his own case, he says, ‘I didn’t want what happened to me to happen. It was all given to me. A gift from God’ (1989, p. 160). Critic Arnaud Malgorn writes, ‘Green Eyes … is one of Genet’s true heroes’ (1988, p. 74). I would argue that Lefranc, not Green Eyes, commits the exemplary Genetian act of revolt. Unlike Green Eyes, Lefranc determines his own destiny, instead of being determined by it. He represents absolute abjection, being rejected both by society and by the social order established by the criminals since, as Green Eyes reminds him, his murder will not even earn him kudos amongst the prison inmates. Lefranc, I feel, is one of Genet’s little-recognized antiheroes of revolt. The 1947 edition of Deathwatch ends as Lefranc says, ‘I am really all alone’ (2002, p. 121). Genet clarifies the relationship between revolt and solitude in his novel The Thief’s Journal: ‘it is perhaps their moral solitude—to which I aspire—that makes me admire traitors and love them’ (1964b, p. 46). Deathwatch illustrates the individualist solitude implicit in Genet’s early theorizations of revolt. The only relationship the three cellmates share is one of reluctant mutual dependence. Like Jean-Paul Sartre’s three characters in Huis clos, Genet’s are imprisoned not only literally, but also psychologically, by each other’s gaze. As Sartre explains, ‘Into whatever I say about myself … into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgement enters’ (1976, p. 200). In


In Genet’s novels and early plays, this violent outburst takes the form of murder. In Our Lady of the Flowers the narrator expresses his esteem for murderers:


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Deathwatch, the Self’s existence depends on the Other: Lefranc relies on subordinating Maurice to impress the prison’s hardened criminals; Maurice counts on Green Eyes to protect him from Lefranc’s aggression; Green Eyes is illiterate, and depends on Lefranc’s writing skills to communicate with his wife. Whilst Sartre’s three prisoners in hell seek ratification of the Self via recognition by the Other, Genet’s inmates aspire towards absolute isolation from the Other’s restricting gaze, by annihilating that Other. The characters have already dislocated themselves from society by committing crimes; they now each seek total solitude from each other. Maurice might appear to idolize Green Eyes, but Green Eyes notes that any relationship of solidarity is invariably feigned: when Maurice says he would ‘never’ betray Green Eyes, Green Eyes replies, ‘Never say never. I know all about friends who swear they’ll do things’ (1989, p. 123). Green Eyes himself, instead of cultivating his dependence on Lefranc, rids himself of it, telling Lefranc he can have his wife, and threatening to kill Lefranc: ‘Watch your step, or somebody in this cell’s going to be taken for a joyride’ (ibid., p. 109). Green Eyes’ feelings towards Maurice are no less hostile. He yells at both cellmates: ‘I’m sick of all of you. You no longer exist’ (ibid., p. 121). Lefranc, too, antagonizes the others. Maurice tells him, ‘You’d like to squelch us, both of us’ (ibid., p. 113). Indeed, Lefranc fulfils this prophecy by murdering Maurice. Each character alienates himself from the others in an attempt to achieve total revolt, by the individual and for the individual. For Genet, the singular act is both defiant, since it challenges the status quo, and aesthetic. In his novel Querelle, the narrator describes how Querelle’s act of murder reflects his ‘creative singularity’ (1974, p. 130); it is later described as ‘a work of art’ (ibid., p. 147). Green Eyes in Deathwatch describes himself as ‘a fine phrase’ (1989, p. 123). The murderer writes rules instead of adhering to them, and is therefore a poet. Genet himself says: [R]ules must be invented at every opportunity. They are more aesthetic than moral, and they are to be discovered—or invented—as a result of insecurity. The rules that guide me and that I invent are against rules, I mean, against the law. (2004, p. 361)


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The ‘insecurity’, the ‘risk without guarantee’ precipitated by the abandonment of law, enables the creative invention of new structures, languages and societies. So is the Genetian subject—unwavering in its rejection of social mores; resolved in its demolition of solidarity; ruthless in its rebellion—egotistical,



Cruelly, he casts aside all inquisitive minds, all friends, all temptations that might try to direct his work towards the world. If he wishes, he can do it like this: he can surround himself with a smell that is so foul, so black, that he loses himself in it, almost suffocates himself in it. Everyone flees. He is alone. His apparent curse will enable him to dare anything because nobody’s gaze disturbs him. (2002, p. 826) Both innovation and revolt are achieved by ‘cruelly’ driving away others. From the resultant solitude, the artist’s or the rebel’s singular and innovative acts emerge. As I have illustrated, the characters in Deathwatch attempt singular acts of abjection in their respective searches for personal, not social revolt. Likewise, the eponymous characters Claire and Solange in The Maids attempt to murder their mistress Madame to gain personal emancipation and to satisfy their fascination with crime; the gangsters in Splendid’s favour cowardly surrender over a pitched battle with the police, so they can sink further into their own loathsome abjection. It is true that these personal revolts could metaphorically connote social revolt. As Sartre states when defining his own politically committed theatre, ‘a character is defined positively by his situation and his action and negatively by his reluctance to take action’ (1976, p. 113). It is true that the actions of Genet’s characters in these plays perhaps pose a more rebellious symbolic threat to dominant classes or systems than the empty revolutionary gestures of Roger and his insurgent comrades in The Balcony. It is common for critics to perceive all aspects of Genet’s works as political: Derrida suggests that all Genet’s ‘speaking and writing’ is indirectly political, since he ‘never separated the idea of revolution from that of the poetic event’ (2004, p. 23); and Scott Durham argues that dynamics on a micro-level between Genet’s characters represent ethical and political relationships: ‘The drives and narratives that govern individual experience are immediately mapped onto the socius’ (2004, p. 71). However, I feel it is problematic to assume that personal revolt leads causally to social revolution. Individualist transgression at any price can precipitate the catastrophic demise of community. I now attempt to show how Genet’s The Blacks proposes collective revolt via subtle dialogue between individuals.


individualist, anti-communitarian? Genet’s novels and earlier plays, notably Deathwatch, certainly imply this. In Genet’s essay on aesthetics, Le Funambule, the actions of the tightrope walker appear solitary and exclusionary:


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Ten or fifteen years ago, I was against you. Now I am neither for you nor against you … my problem is not to oppose myself to you but to make something in which we are caught up together, you as well as me. (2004, p. 8) By the 1970s, it is well known that Genet’s engagement had become incontestable. In a 1974 article for L’Humanité, he writes: What is it that concerns me and obliges me to write? What is my interest here? My own interest in this is something that goes far beyond me and is at the same time no one’s concern but mine: I need a transformation of the lot of disenfranchised workers, of immigrants, the transformation of the Third World, even its metamorphosis, together with new relations between Europe and the Third World. (Ibid., p. 106) His interest is his ‘own’—it derives from his own singular aspirations towards revolt. Individuals must not compromise the autonomy of their own desires and opinions. Yet, Genet states that his motivation concurrently ‘goes far beyond’ him—it transcends any narcissistic quest for singularity, as he attempts to challenge and change dominant and dominating discourses for the benefit of oppressed peoples. In his 1983 interview Genet declares his sympathies with certain groups: ‘Between the Palestinians, the Panthers, the Red Army Faction, and myself, there are affinities’ (ibid., p. 235). In Prisoner of Love he describes these groups as ‘moss, lichen, grass, a few dog roses capable of pushing up through red granite’ (1992, p. 337). Genet’s support for certain groups does not betray his commitment to revolt against order and authority, since these groups themselves seek to overturn the systems that oppress them like mosses and lichens that crack the paving stones on top of them. In L’Enfant criminel, written around the time of The Blacks, Genet explains how he and his fellow child delinquents in the Mettray penitentiary would band together in ‘that desire to venture beyond the law of the Good’ (1958, p. 51). Their commonality derived from their shared desire to contravene the laws of the righteous. Secondly, Genet does not betray his commitment to


I propose that during the mid-1950s, an ethics of collectivity evolved in Genet’s philosophical-political aesthetic, and that The Blacks constitutes the pivotal point.4 Action becomes focused clearly on radical social change as opposed to personal liberation. Genet himself suggests as much in his 1964 interview:


singularity, because he always maintains a critical distance between himself and any cause. He prefers to call himself ‘vagabond’ rather than ‘revolutionary’, since he would sooner abandon a cause than subscribe unquestioningly to it (2004, p. 43). Genet’s new-found socialism attempted to accommodate his former devotion to singularity. The Blacks encapsulates these politics of society and specificity. The onstage Blacks are committed to the Genetian insistence on singularity and revolt: they demolish discourses of fixity and hegemony, as I illustrate. However, unlike the singularity of characters in Genet’s novels and previous plays, the Blacks’ ethics are communitarian. Through constant debate between the characters, the common aim is achieved, of deconstructing the white image of Blacks. The stand-off between Negroes and Whites is part of a self-conscious role-play.5 In fact, the opposing sides collaborate collectively to stage the show. The two factions are not genuine enemies, but are played by actors from the same troupe. During their verbal joust, Felicity and the Queen, from supposedly opposing sides, move forward ‘side by side, almost amicably’ (1960, p. 103). The dynamic in the play between cooperation and conflict encapsulates Genet’s negotiation of collectivity with individualism, as he juxtaposes sparring with speaking; diatribe with dialogue. The role-play enacted by Master of Ceremonies Archibald’s troupe remains faithful to Genet’s insistence that radical revolt be Evil, disruptive, singular and creative. The troupe of black actors staging a play for the White Court rejects the liberalism censured by Zizek. Archibald admonishes Diouf’s pacifying gestures towards the Whites: ‘We know your argument. You’re going to urge us to be reasonable, to be conciliatory. But we’re bent on being unreasonable, on being hostile’ (ibid., p. 29). Diouf is already a servant of the Whites since he is ‘Vicar of SainteClotilde’; now, he wants to negotiate with them. Anti-colonial writer and activist Frantz Fanon states in Black Skin White Masks, ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (1967, p. 110). The Negroes’ identities have been distorted grotesquely by the imposition of white culture: their ‘heavily spangled evening gowns suggest fake elegance, the very height of bad taste’ (1960, p. 8). Their names, too—Archibald Absalom Wellington; Felicity Trollop Pardon, Stephanie Virtue Secret-rose Diop—reveal how European discourses attempt to suffocate African indigenousness. Fanon writes, ‘what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artefact’ (1967, p. 14). For Zizek, ‘the only way an oppressed people or individual can react initially to such a situation is through some kind of irrational violent outburst which simply allows them to acquire a certain distance towards it’ (2004, p. 120).




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The Negroes exercise what Zizek terms ‘extreme symbolic violence’, to gain distance from the fixed and essentializing images imposed upon them by the Whites. They behave as ‘primitive’ ‘savages’; send smoke signals (1960, p. 23); smell of ‘the pestilence of [their] swamps’ (ibid., p. 20); hint at their cannibalistic practices;6 claim to abuse children (ibid., p. 41); torment voodoo dolls of White Court members (ibid., p. 73); portray themselves as sexual predators;7 and Snow eats the white woman’s funeral flowers. British artist Chris Ofili, winner of the 1998 Turner Prize, paints grossly exaggerated black figures, whose thick lips, broad noses and afro hair evoke the ‘smelly, thick-lipped, snub-nosed Negro … oozing oil and sweat’ described by Snow in The Blacks (ibid., p. 27).8 Ofili decorates his central subjects with garlands of beads or stars. At the centre of each ornament, he pastes a small cut-out image of a 1970s blaxploitation figure—soul man, sex worker, drug dealer. Ofili’s paintings hyperbolize images of black ethnicity until the viewer is forced to recognize the essentializing discourses with which Blacks are often represented. Fanon writes, ‘I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships’ (1967, p. 112). Like Ofili, Genet’s Negroes exaggerate and subvert the images to which they are reduced, into preposterous caricatures. Archibald vindicates, ‘Since they merge us with an image and drown us in it, let the image set their teeth on edge!’ and ‘Let Negroes negrify themselves. Let them persist to the point of madness in what they’re condemned to be, in their ebony, in their odor, in their yellow eyes, in their cannibal tastes’ (1960, pp. 39, 52). Fanon writes, ‘Negroes are savages, brutes, illiterates. But in my own case I knew that these statements were false. … We had physicians, professors, statesmen’ (1967, p. 117). Only by doing violence to the White Court’s prejudices, can the Negroes begin to demolish the totalizing images forced upon them, and to express their own singularity. The troupe commits Evil not only by doing violence to white imagery, but also by doing ‘violence against itself’ as Zizek puts it. Concurrent with their collective resistance to essentializing white discourses, each character individually resists any immutable image. Genet prevents the Blacks from being subsumed into any new self-image, for example Negritude. Fanon refers with scepticism to Léopold Senghor, for whom ‘western’ art is characterized by ‘the kind of symmetry that gives rise to monotony’, whilst ‘Negro’ art sways to a primordial rhythm that ‘is alive, it is free’. Senghor continues, ‘that character of abandon which is ours is itself rhythmic’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 123). Fanon is unconvinced: ‘one had to distrust rhythm, earth-mother love, this mystic, carnal


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marriage of the group and the cosmos’ (ibid., p. 125). Negritude was intended to liberate Blacks from stereotype; but simply confined them to new stereotypes, these ones revolving around Blacks’ supposedly primal relationship with the world’s ‘natural rhythms’. Fanon insists, ‘Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes’ (ibid., p. 136). Felicity’s rousing ‘Dahomey’ speeches in The Blacks account for the elusive heterogeneity represented by members of the hugely diverse global ‘black’ population. Felicity addresses ‘Princes of the Upper Empires’, ‘Negroes of the ponds’, ‘Negroes of the docks, of the factories, of the dives, Negroes of the Ford plant, Negroes of General Motors’ (1960, p. 76). She admits, ‘I can’t describe you all, nor even name you all, nor name your dead’ (ibid., p. 77). The Blacks do not reduce themselves to the monolithic block constructed by Negritude activists. Zizek ends Tarrying with the Negative with the following hopeful musing: ‘Perhaps … our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the “nonexistence of the Other,” of tarrying with the negative.’ (1993, p. 237; original italics). For Zizek, the only safeguard against discrimination is to conceive of the Other in the negative. In other words, not to attribute to the Other any essential organic characteristic, whether national, ethnic, racial or sexual. Genet’s The Blacks avoids the potentially essentializing practice of defining what Blacks are. Genet writes, in his recently published preface to The Blacks, ‘This play is written not for the Blacks, but against the Whites’ (2002, p. 842; original italics). Collective revolt in the play does not totalize singularity. To this end, Genet strategically foregrounds the significance of ‘hatred’. Corvin states, ‘Only hatred, leading to the destruction of these Whites that form a screen between [the Negroes] and themselves, will have the power … to shatter the mirror that holds their image prisoner’ (2005, p. ii). I argue that the Negroes show hatred both of the Whites, and self-hatred. If love signifies acceptance, mediocrity, compromise and complicity with the status quo of dominant hegemonies, hatred represents disdain for essentializing discourses. Archibald instructs the Negroes: ‘Invent not love, but hatred, and thereby make poetry, since that’s the only domain in which we’re allowed to operate (1960, p. 26). Ville de Saint-Nazaire says, ‘As long as the earth revolves about the sun … in a secret chamber, Negroes will …’. Bobo finishes his sentence: ‘Will hate!’ (ibid., p. 85). Village declares to his beloved, or rather, ‘behated’ Virtue, ‘I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love’ (ibid., p. 36). He continues, ‘No, no, there’ll be no love for us’ (ibid., p. 38). Archibald’s following reference to hatred is




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arcane, but illuminating: ‘You’re a Negro and a performer. Neither of whom will know love’ (ibid., p. 39). For both actors and Negroes, identity is scripted, predetermined. Only hatred, namely the refusal to submit to roles dictated by society, will enable them to break free. The violence the Blacks commit against themselves is both symbolic, and literal. Ville de Saint-Nazaire, responsible for reporting offstage events to the onstage cast, states, ‘We shall have to get used to the responsibility of executing our own traitors’ (ibid., p. 111). This execution cannot be compared with Genet’s gratuitous murders, like Lefranc’s Deathwatch, committed by individuals who demarcate their singularity as distinct from social propriety. Ville de Saint-Nazaire states, ‘We’ll have to get used to taking responsibility for blood—our own. And the moral weight’ (ibid., p. 82). The violence the Blacks commit against themselves is intended to provoke a radical transformation of society. These statements echo Zizek’s conviction that ‘true changes are painful’; that ‘every authentic ethical stance’ demands ‘terrorism’ (2001, p. 149). Like Zizek, Genet’s Blacks, who execute a traitor for a higher common cause, could be accused of totalitarianism. The play’s ending is ambiguous: ‘Hand in hand, Village and Virtue walk toward [all the Blacks], thus turning their backs to the audience’ (1960, p. 128). I disagree with critics who propose an unequivocally optimistic exegesis of this ending. For Hubert, personal liberation is attained through love, and collective liberation through revolution (1996, p. 126). For me, Village and Virtue have surrendered to love, and in the final lines of the play, Virtue expresses her misgivings about this apparent capitulation: VILLAGE: VIRTUE: VILLAGE:

… If I put my arms around your shoulders—let me—if I hug you? All men are like you: they imitate. Can’t you invent something else? For you I could invent anything: fruits, brighter words, a two-wheeled wheelbarrow, cherries without pits, a bed for three, a needle that doesn’t prick. (1960, p. 128)


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After all his attempts to forge new identities via rebellious hatred, Village yields to the mediocrity of ‘imitation’. He can invent only things that already exist: fruit, a bed, a wheelbarrow. The Blacks turn their backs and seem to walk away as one monolithic block. Genet’s preferred ending— in Roger Blin’s 1959 production—implies this totalization, as the whole troupe breaks into ‘African dance’ (2002, p. 474). Have the Blacks succumbed to Negritude’s primordial rhythms that are supposedly



my non-belonging, to [the Palestinian] nation and their movement, with which I never really identified myself. My heart was in it; my body was in it; my spirit was in it. Everything was in it at one time or another; but never my total belief, never the whole of myself. (1992, p. 90; translation modified) Elsewhere, he explains, ‘it’s in solitude that I accept being with the Palestinians … It’s when I’m alone I decide on my own’ (2004, p. 245). The tension between ‘non-belonging’ and ‘belonging’, between ‘everything’ and ‘never the whole’, between ‘alone’ and ‘with’, defines Genet’s politics. Both an affinity, and an irreducible distance must be maintained between the cause and the individual’s belief. Revolt can be both Evil and ethical; singular and communitarian. Notwithstanding, Genet himself maintains a distance between this ‘Micro-Treatise on a MiniPolitics’ and himself. Genet’s politics are not programmatic: they solicit us to stir from our mediocrity and to challenge the system, not to submit to his system. Genet’s desire is to inspire, not to instruct: My advice to you here is vain, clumsy. No one would be able to follow it. … I wanted to inflame, not to teach you. (2002, p. 834)

Notes 1. I attempt to define certain terms in the Genetian glossary—‘revolt’; ‘hatred’— whilst remaining aware that terms shift and re-form in Genet’s works. When asked to define truth, Genet replies, ‘before all else, it’s a word’ (2004, p. 139). 2. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated in Works cited. 3. For example, Serreau (1966, p. 120) and Guicharnaud (1967, p. 263). 4. According to Edmund White, Genet’s first politically committed act took place in 1955, when he signed a petition against the French presence in Algeria (1993, p. 472). Theatre theoreticians often locate Genet’s shift from the personal to political in The Balcony (see Hubert, 1996, p. 7). I do not contradict this, but feel that the subversive and transgressional performed by the


‘alive’ and ‘free’, but that reconstruct Blacks for the White’s gaze? This seems the case, as the African beat then gives way to a Mozart minuet. Genet creates a hopeful collectivity of singular identities, which he himself subsequently problematizes. And yet, perhaps both the execution and this stage exit are simply part of the Negroes’ playful, dissenting role-play, and cannot be read literally.9 As Corvin states, ‘The Blacks is a theatre of appearances, not of intervention’ (2005, p. xxi). In Prisoner of Love, Genet writes about:


5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

Clare Finburgh customers of the brothel are, again, individualist, and not for collective ends; and the socialist revolution, of course, fails. The French title Les Nègres translates literally into English as ‘The Negroes’, not ‘The Blacks’, which in French would be Les Noirs. Michel Corvin rightly makes the distinction between the ‘Negroes’ who stage the role-play, and the ‘Blacks’ who constitute the entire troupe of actors (2005, p. viii). The Governor cries in fear for the murdered woman: ‘They’re going to cook her and eat her! Take their matches away!’ (1960, p. 23). The main protagonst in the role-play, Village, chants as he enters the white woman’s house, ‘Listen to the singing of my thighs! Listen! (He makes his thighs bulge under his trousers.) That sound is the mewing of panthers and tigers. When they bend, that means leopards are stretching. If I unbutton, an eagle of the Great Empire will swoop down …’ (ibid., p. 64). For example, Chris Ofili’s painting The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1999). For an excellent investigation into stratifications of illusion and reality in The Blacks, see Boisseron and Ekotto (2004).

Works cited Boisseron, B. and F. Ekotto. ‘Genet’s The Blacks: “And Why Does One Laugh at a Negro?” ’, Genet, ed. M. Hanrahan, special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004), 98–112. Corvin, M. ‘Introduction’, in Les Nègres (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 2005). Derrida, J. ‘Countersignature’, trans. M. Hanrahan, Genet special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004), 7–42. Durham, S. ‘The Divided Event: The Aesthetics and Politics of Virtuality in Funeral Rites’, Genet special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004), 59–76. Fanon, F. Black Skin White Masks, trans. C.L. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Genet, J. Le Funambule avec L’Enfant criminel (Décines: L’Arbalète, 1958). –––– The Blacks, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1960). —— Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Anthony Blond, 1964a). —— The Thief’s Journal, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1964b). —— Querelle, trans. A. Hollo (New York: Grove Press, 1974). —— Deathwatch, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). —— Prisoner of Love, trans. B. Bray (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992). —— Théâtre complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). —— The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. A Dichy, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Guicharnaud, J. Modern French Theatre (New Haven, MA: Yale University Press, 1967). Hubert, M-C. L’Esthétique de Jean Genet (Paris: SEDES, 1996). Malgorn, A. Jean Genet (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988). Sartre, J-P. Sartre on Theatre, trans. F. Jellinek (London: Quartet Books, 1976). Serreau, G. Histoire du ‘Nouveau théâtre’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). White, E. Genet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993).


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Zizek, S.Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). —— with J. Butler and E. Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London and New York: Verso, 2000). —— Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London and New York: Verso, 2001). —— with Glyn Daly, Conversations with Zizek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).





Part III


Genet and Experimental Performance





7 Carl Lavery

Genet’s theatre works negate both the nature of theatre and the contemporary social world itself. (Barber, 2004, p. 86) Since the late 1980s, the most sophisticated political interpretations of Genet’s theatre have been produced by critics interested in poststructuralism. For readers who have adopted this methodology, the significance of plays like The Balcony, The Blacks and The Screens does not reside in any obvious or coherent political message they may offer, but rather in the way they deconstruct identity, highlight performativity and release the anarchic play of the signifier.1 While much good has come from this post-structuralist approach, the emphasis it places on suspension, paradox and undecidability has nevertheless tended to occlude the more affirmative and ecstatic aspects of Genet’s political dramaturgy. In what follows, I intend to redress this balance by teasing out the utopian elements in Genet’s theory of political theatre through a comparison with Raoul Vaneigem’s notion of the ‘revolution of everyday life’, that is, a revolution which strives to liberate the subject spatially and temporally by replacing Thanatos (the death drive) with Eros (the life force). I do this by concentrating on ‘That Strange Word …’, a theoretical essay in which Genet sketches out his plans for a site-based production for his last play, The Screens.2 Before I start, a word of caution is necessary: Genet’s call for a theatre in a graveyard never came to fruition. The Screens was eventually staged by Roger Blin in the more conventional surroundings of the Odéon Theatre in 1966. However, that ought not to stop us from theorizing about the political potential in ‘That Strange Word …’, for, as the collaboration between Peter Sellars and Cornerstone Theatre on a site-based version of The Screens/Los biombos


Theatre in a Graveyard: Site-based Performance and the Revolution of Everyday Life

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in East Los Angeles in 1998 underlines, this is exactly how the radical energy of Genet’s theatre can best be accessed (see Chapter 15, ‘Interview with Bill Rauch and Lynn Jeffries’ in this volume).

In his dramaturgical essays and theatrical prefaces from the 1950s through to the 1980s, Genet is always at pains to distance himself from both realist and formalist aesthetics. In his view, realism is a paradoxical political form. Instead of provoking action, it merely produces catharsis through identification: ‘The fictional representation of an action, of an experience, generally stops us from carrying them out in reality and by ourselves’ (Genet, 1991, p. xiv). Where realism, according to Genet, creates catharsis through vicarious experience, formalism—modernist, self-reflexive art—gives rise to catharsis through contemplation. Faced with the formalist work, Genet proposes that the spectator undergoes ‘a loss of “self” ’ (2003, p. 119). In the aesthetic, Genet continues, ‘I lose more and more the sense of being “myself”, the sense of “I”, and become nothing but the perception of the artwork’ (ibid., p. 118). For Genet, aesthetic experience of this kind is the very antithesis of revolutionary praxis: it dissolves the type of active subjectivity needed to change the world: ‘Confronted with subversive events, my “ego” or my “self”, my “social self” is … more and more filled, it is more and more inflated … and I am less and less free for precisely that type of [aesthetic] contemplation’ (ibid., p. 118).3 Genet’s rejection of conventional aesthetic experience does not mean, however, that he dismisses the subversive potential of art altogether. In the ‘Introduction’ to Soledad Brother, his foreword to the prison letters of the Black Panther member, George Jackson, he proposes: If we accept the idea that the revolutionary enterprise of a man or a people has its source in their poetic genius, or more precisely, that this enterprise is the inevitable conclusion of poetic genius, we must reject nothing that makes poetic exaltation possible. (2004, p. 54)


Genet and the avant-garde

This is a crucial passage in Genet’s thinking, and one that gets to the very core of his concept of political art. As he expresses it here, poetry transcends its usual textual and/or linguistic definition, and is, rather, an attitude, a way of existing, a mode of revolt. The revolutionary is a ‘poetic genius’, proposes Genet, because he creates new vocabularies and produces alternative modes of being. By equating revolutionary


praxis with poetry, Genet distances himself from the thinking of contemporary Marxist playwrights and aestheticians such as Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno who, despite their interest in political art, nevertheless strive to protect the aesthetic as a privileged space, which, for them, is somehow set apart from the world. There is no desire on Genet’s part to safeguard the aesthetic as a specialized site. On the contrary, he contends that poetry and praxis are, if directed towards revolutionary ends, one and the same thing. For that reason, it is perhaps more accurate to read his politics of performance in terms of the utopian agenda of the historical avant-garde, which, as Peter Bürger famously argued, is characterized by an attempt to revolutionize society by questioning rigid distinctions between art and everyday life: ‘The European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men’ (1984, p. 49). In his late theatre, Genet undermines the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic by re-introducing the very thing that western drama has traditionally banished from the stage: actual experience. He does this in two very different ways. In The Balcony and The Blacks, the tactic is similar to that used by conceptual and minimalist artists of the late 1950s, that is to say, he deflects attention away from the art object (the play itself) and focuses it instead on the context in which aesthetic/theatrical experience occurs (the environment or theatre space). Genet’s strategy is not intended to produce a self-sufficient art, as it is in the metatheatrical experiments of Modernist playwrights such as Luigi Pirandello and Samuel Beckett. Rather, Genet wants to question theatre’s function, its institutional value, by highjacking its vicariousness and by putting the spectator on trial. At the end of The Balcony, the actress playing Irma steps out of character—what Kirby calls ‘matrixed acting’ (1995, p. 43)— and tells the spectators that real life back at home is even more illusory than the play they have just been watching. And in The Blacks, white spectators are forced to bear witness to black actors who use the play’s multiple layers as a type of theatrical camouflage to express their hatred of western society (see Chapter 5 in this volume). Archibald’s direct address to the audience in the opening moments of the play is a good example of this:


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ARCHIBALD: (to the audience) Be quiet. This evening we’ll perform for you. But, in order that you may remain comfortably settled in your seats in the presence of the drama that is already unfolding here, in


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In The Blacks and The Balcony, Genet disrupts the spatial logic of western drama by allowing life to enter the theatre from the outside in. In The Screens, however, Genet adopts a different, more radical technique. In this work, he works to erase the gap between art and life from the inside out by demanding that the play be staged in a graveyard, which, in its turn, is to be situated in the very heart of Paris. In ‘That Strange Word …’, he gives precise instructions about the type of graveyard he wants the play to be performed in: I’m not speaking of a dead cemetery, but a live one, not the kind where only a few gravestones remain. I’m speaking of a cemetery where graves would continue to be dug and the dead buried, I’m speaking of a Crematorium where corpses are cooked day and night. (2003, p. 108) Genet’s search for an alternative site for performance is caused by a distrust of the neutrality of conventional theatre space. Theatre in a building reassures and protects spectators—it does not ‘set them ablaze’, or ‘stir up trouble in them’ (ibid., p. 109). Theatre in a graveyard, by contrast, allows the theatrical event to exploit its full dynamic potential: ‘If such a location were used, as much a part of urbanism as of culture, writers would be less frivolous, they’d think before having plays performed there’ (ibid.). The insights of the performance theorist Allan Kaprow support Genet’s aesthetic and spatial intuitions. According to Kaprow, site-based performance undermines the spectator’s habitual response to reality in a fundamental manner. This is because, continues Kaprow, site-based work does not just distance the audience semiotically; rather, it distances the audience spatially by dissolving the ground of the real itself. For Kaprow, the dislocation caused by such estrangement provokes a profound sense of uncanniness: ‘Such displacements of ordinary emphasis increase attentiveness … to the peripheral parts of ourselves and to our surroundings. Revealed in this way they are strange. Participants could feel momentarily separated from themselves’ (Kaprow, quoted in Gorman, 2003, p. 89). Kaprow’s comments illuminate Genet’s argument in ‘That Strange Word …’. They suggest that his desire to stage The Screens in a cemetery was a deliberate attempt, on his part, to


order that you might be assured that there is no danger of such a drama worming its way into your precious lives, we shall even have the decency—a decency learned from you—to make communication impossible. (1960, p. 12)



transform theatre from a spectacular diversion into an actual event, a way of disorientating the audience spatially and ontologically. And the aim behind this? To create a revolution in consciousness, a revolution that would radically revise the spectator’s habitual response to the world.

In the Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem contends that individuals in developed capitalist societies experience a deep sense of misery, humiliation and boredom. The increased time demands made by work and the ‘sheer madness’ of ‘an economy of consumption’ have deprived them of ‘poetry, childhood and creativity’ (1983, p. 15). For Vaneigem, this has produced a social order in which death has triumphed over life: ‘A community which is not built on individual demands … can only reinforce the oppressive violence of power. … The perspective of Power has only one horizon: death. And life goes to this well of despair so often that in the end it falls in and drowns’ (ibid., p. 34). Vaneigem’s solution to the deathly ‘mechanized slaughterhouses of work’ (ibid., p. 37) is to call for a complete revolution of everyday life, a revolution in which poetry is ‘the fulfilment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence’ (ibid., p. 146). In Vaneigem’s view, such a revolution has nothing in common with Marxism’s attachment to the impersonal laws of history and economics. Rather, it is a revolution which is defined by the individual’s attempt to re-appropriate his/her own lived space-time, that is, his/her creativity. Crucially, for Vaneigem, the emergence of the authentic, non-alienated life is predicated upon a dialetical encounter with death, since, as he has it, ‘the consciousness of the reality of decay feeds the consciousness of the necessity of transcendence’ (ibid., p. 171). Although Vaneigem is not a thinker with whom Genet is traditionally associated, his analysis of alienation and revolution is particularly helpful for disclosing the utopian politics of ‘That Strange Word …’. The similarities between Vaneigem and Genet are apparent in the latter’s attack on Cartesian rationality and scientific thought. Instead of living creatively and joyfully, the western individual, Genet argues, is brutalized and disciplined by a technological society that deprives the world of ‘shadow’, a word, which in his vocabulary, is associated with magic, poetry, and the mythical: ‘We must take refuge [and] discover a fresh and scorching shadow, which will be our work’ (2003, p. 110). As well as depoeticizing life, science and technology have had disastrous existential


Theatre and the revolution of everyday life


Carl Lavery

consequences. By replacing myth with truth and subjecting existence to ‘the luminosity of analysis’ (ibid.), they have created, continues Genet, a culture that is both frightened by, and obsessed with, death. Instead of accepting death as a part of life, modern secular subjects do their utmost to deny it, a phenomenon which can be observed spatially in the way that urban planners have reduced ‘crematoria in cities … to the dimension of a grocery store’ (ibid., p. 103). For Genet, urbanism’s attempt to ‘repress’ death has a vicious circularity, since it inhibits the production of poetry and performance, which, he believes, provide ways of coping with the terror of non-being. The paradoxical relationship that Genet proposes between art and death fuels his critique of urbanism in ‘That Strange Word …’: That strange word ‘urbanism’, whether it comes from a Pope Urban or from the City, will maybe no longer be concerned with the dead. The living will get rid of their corpses, slyly or not, as one rids oneself of a shameful thought. By hurrying them to the crematorium furnace, the urbanized world deprives itself of a great theatrical aid, and perhaps of theatre itself. (ibid., p. 103) Genet’s desire to subvert the boredom and anxiety produced by urbanism lies behind his calls for a new theatrical architecture: In today’s cities, the only place … where a theatre could be built is the cemetery. The choice will benefit both the cemetery and the theatre. … Think of the spectators’ exit after Mozart’s Don Giovanni, leaving amid the dead lying underground, before returning to secular life. Neither the conversations nor the silence would be the same as at the exit of a Parisian theatre. (ibid., pp. 107–8) In ‘That Strange Word …’, Genet’s desire to liberate the spectator from death is not limited to space: it has important temporal aspects too. The aim of theatre in a graveyard is to provoke ‘a breathtaking liberation’ that would allow the spectator to ‘escape historical and theological [notions] of time’ (ibid., p. 104; translation modified). According to Genet, time, like space, is inherently political because it legitimizes origins, endings and foundations, a way of thinking which is illustrated in ‘That Strange Word …’, when he points out how western colonialism exploits theological notions of time to justify its attempt to reduce the entire globe to its own image: ‘Caught in a named, counted time starting from an event that is of interest only to the West, the world is at great


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risk, if it accepts this time’ (ibid.). Genet’s answer to the homogeneity of theological/colonialist time is to encourage individuals to ‘give birth to a multitude of calendars, in such a way as to put the Christian era and what follows that counted time, starting from the Very Questionable Nativity, out of business’ (ibid., pp. 104–5). Once again, then, death and politics are combined in Genet’s dramaturgy. The refusal to dominate the Other is dependent on a refusal of onto-theological notions of redemption, that is, of eternal life. As we can see from this reading, the site-based dramaturgy that Genet advocates in ‘That Strange Word …’ is more than a simple treatise on theatre: rather, it is perhaps best understood as a utopian attempt to overcome the nihilism of western metaphysics by advocating a revolution that would contest conventional notions of time and space. Historical factors are important to consider here. Like Vaneigem (1983, pp. 22–3), Genet realized that the loss of Algeria in the early 1960s marked an important turning point in French cultural history. Henceforth, colonization was no longer something which occurred overseas; rather, it was a practice that was now extended to French citizens on home soil.4

A play for a graveyard In his interview with Nick Kaye, Clifford McLucas defines site-specific performance in terms of a dialectical relationship between ‘host’ and ‘ghost’: I began to use the term ‘the host and the ghost’ to describe the relationship between place and event. The host site is haunted for a time by a ghost that the theatre-maker creates. Like all ghosts it is transparent and the host can be seen through the ghost. (McLucas, quoted in Kaye, 2000, p. 128) McLucas’ observations show that the choice of site (the host) in sitespecific performance does not determine or fix the meaning of the work (ghost). Rather, the work helps to produce the spatial significance of the site itself. The work haunts the site and, by so doing, has a critical role to play in the effect produced by the performance event. If, then, we are to grasp fully the political potential of Genet’s theatre in a graveyard, we need to take a closer look at The Screens, the play it was intended to host. The Screens is Genet’s most provocative and controversial play: it deals with the Algerian war in a way that is designed to inflict maximum




Carl Lavery

suffering and distress on a French audience. In The Screens, the French colons are depicted as cynical exploiters; the Army, the symbol par excellence of French masculinity, is effete and homosexual; and the Algerian rebels easily defeat the colonizers. The scene, however, that created the greatest outrage was Tableau Fourteen, in which a group of surviving French soldiers take turns to ‘fart in the face’ of a dying officer in order to conduct a ‘burial’ on home soil. With scenes like this, it was hardly surprising that the play provoked riots when it was performed in the Odéon Theatre in Paris in April 1966, and was only allowed to continue its run when André Malraux, General de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, intervened on its behalf. Genet’s grotesque representations in The Screens were calculated. He knew that Algerian independence was particularly traumatic for the French, because, unlike Vietnam or Senegal, Algeria had not been accorded separate status as a colony. Rather, Algeria was a département, as much a part of France as Normandy or Brittany. To lose Algeria, then, was to lose a part of France itself. The French response to this crisis (which very nearly resulted in civil war) was to deny it. Algeria’s battle for independence was not accorded the status of a war by the French government until 1998; contemporary representations of the conflict, such as the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers, were banned in France until the 1970s; the media refused to talk about the war; and General de Gaulle, President of the Fifth Republic, embarked on a project of French self-aggrandizement that was largely characterized by an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the United States. In psychological terms, the French were in a process of what psychoanalysis would call ‘collective repression’, unable to accept the loss of Empire and reluctant to mourn the demise of France’s self-proclaimed mission civilisatrice. In such circumstances, violent aggression seemed a less painful option than active acceptance—doing the work of mourning. The social and political turbulence experienced by France in the 1960s played a major role in influencing Genet’s attempts to site The Screens in social space. For if in site-specific work, as McLucas maintains, the play ghosts the site, then staging The Screens in a graveyard in the city is a method for bringing the war in Algeria into the heart of Paris itself, of letting it loose in the streets. Genet is seeking, in other words, to remind the Parisians of the thing they desperately want to repress: the loss of Algeria. He wants them to confront the demise of the French Empire and to witness the triumph of the Algerian revolutionaries. To that extent, the graveyard that is intended to host The Screens is not simply there to remind the spectators of the presence of death as an ontological


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phenomenon. On the contrary, it provides the space for a specific form of historical mourning, a site in which French colonialism can be buried. Ultimately, Genet’s ambition in ‘That Strange Word …’ is to be the gravedigger of western society. His intention is to hold a wake in which the passing of the old European world order would be replaced by the emergence of new forms of social organization that would refuse the theological, death-obsessed logic which, he contends, is exported globally through the ambitions of western imperialism. Approached as a historically situated, site-based work, The Screens can no longer be dismissed, as it sometimes has been, as an expression of Genet’s nihilism.5 Rather, it becomes an affirmative play which seeks to revolutionize everyday life by transgressing accepted concepts of time and space. It is no coincidence that Genet should, at the start of the essay, trace the origins of the word urbanism to Pope Urban. Urbanism, in Genet’s view, is a theological and political practice. Its aim is to refuse history by denying time. Erecting civic buildings and monuments in the city manufactures a sense of permanence: it gives the impression of eternity. Genet’s response to this architecture of denial is to urge future urban planners to create a city of ruins and cemeteries, a necropolis in which ‘the theater will be placed as close as possible, in the tutelary shade of the place where the dead are kept’ (2003, p. 104). In this way, Genet intends theatre to exist as a constant reminder of death, transformation and change, experiences and processes which, according to Raoul Vaneigem, open the ‘memories of mortal wounds’ and, by doing so, articulate forbidden demands for ‘the construction of an art of life’ (1983, p. 180).

Conclusion Viewed from the depressing vantage point of contemporary history, Genet’s utopian calls for a theatre in a graveyard appear hopelessly naïve. However, when placed within the context of France in the 1960s, they take on a very different significance. As Kristin Ross so brilliantly maintains in May ‘68 and its Afterlives, the 1960s were a time of great revolutionary optimism in France, a decade in which the victories of the colonized in Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria, along with the revolt of French students and workers in Paris in 1968, promised the possibility of ‘an exploded world where Europe was no longer the center’ (2002, p. 82). Looking at ‘That Strange Word …’ through Ross’ historical lens underlines the political significance of Genet’s performance practice. Neither Genet nor Vaneigem were lonely, isolated figures. On the contrary, their calls




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for a revolution of everyday life were very much in keeping with the revolutionary aspirations of large sections of French society, who were alienated by governmental policy in both Algeria and France itself. In keeping with the utopian ideals of May 1968, Genet’s quest to site his theatre in a graveyard was an attempt to locate a utopian space where a process of radical decolonization might occur. The failure of May 1968, a revolution whose aims he so fervently supported, caused Genet to abandon the cultural realm and to look for alternative methods for overthrowing the death-obsessed society of the West.

Notes 1. See Oswald (1989), Khélil (2001), Finburgh (2004) and Boisseron and Ekotto (2004). 2. Although it was published in Tel Quel in 1967, ‘That Strange Word …’ is a lost letter which ought to have been included in ‘Letters to Roger Blin’ (2002), a volume of correspondence in which Genet advises Roger Blin on how best to stage The Screens. 3. Genet is thinking of the work of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky. 4. For a good discussion of this see Ross (1995) and (2002). 5. See Innes (1993).

Works cited Barber, S. Jean Genet (London: Reaktion, 2004). Boisseron, B. and F. Ekotto. ‘Genet’s The Blacks: “And Why Does One Laugh at a Negro?” ’, Genet, ed. M. Hanrahan, special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004), 98–112. Bürger, P. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. M. Shaw, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Finburgh, C. ‘Speech Without Acts: Politics and Speech-Act Theory in Genet’s The Balcony’, Genet, ed. Mairéad Hanrahan, special issue of Paragraph, 27: 2 (2004), 113–29. Genet, J. The Blacks, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1960). —— The Balcony, trans, T. Hands and B. Wright (London: Faber and Faber 1991). —— Théâtre Complet, eds, M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). —— Fragments of the Artwork, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). —— The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. A. Dichy, trans. J. Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Gorman, S. ‘Wandering and Wondering: Following Janet Cardiff’s Missing Voice’, Performance Research, 8: 1 (2003), 83–92. Innes, C. Avant-Garde Theatre 1892–1992 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Kaye, N. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).


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Khélil, H. Figures de l’altérité dans le théâtre de Jean Genet: Lecture des Nègres et des Paravents (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). Kirby, M. ‘Acting and Non-Acting’, in Acting (Re)considered, ed. P. Zarilli (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 43–58. Oswald, L. Jean Genet and the Semiotics of Performance (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989). Ross, K. Fast Cars and Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). —— May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Vaneigem, R. The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (London: Aldgate Press, 1983).




8 Martin Hargreaves

Since Divine is dead, the poet may sing her, may tell her legend, the Saga, the annals of Divine. The Divine Saga should be danced, mimed, with subtle directions. Since it is impossible to make a ballet of it, I am forced to use words that are weighed down with precise ideas, but I shall try to lighten them with expressions that are trivial, empty, hollow and invisible. (Genet, 1990, p. 61) Despite Genet’s claims of ‘impossibility’, the ‘ballet’ of Divine’s death in Our Lady of the Flowers has provoked various choreographic responses, particularly from avant-garde dance practitioners. In Japan and in Great Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, two seminal works based on Genet’s novel appeared: Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno’s Divinariane in 1960, which was reworked into Admiring La Argentina in 1977, and Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers: A Pantomime for Jean Genet, performed between 1968 and 1974. The word seminal, with its etymological association with semen, is appropriate when discussing these performances, since both of them draw upon Genet’s connection between choreography and male masturbation. Genet writes the solo embodiment of erotic memories as a kind of dance, and both Ohno and Kemp manifest this in their work. These choreographies also use the character of Divine to present complex images of masculinity, ranging from the solipsistic artist to the gregarious drag queen tragedian. Just as Genet’s Divine moves between ‘he’ and ‘she’ in Our Lady of the Flowers, so Kemp and Ohno redeploy masculinity and femininity in their dances, presenting an androgynous subject who refuses stable gender identities.1 In terms of technique, Ohno and Kemp draw upon the expressive dance vocabularies of pre-war German modern dance, stylistic traditions


Dancing the Impossible: Kazuo Ohno, Lindsay Kemp and Our Lady of the Flowers

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of Japanese theatre, and gestural figurative mime. In different ways they reconfigure performance as an erotically productive encounter with the spectral remains of others, as opposed to a process of authentic selfrevelation. Borrowing Genet’s own strategy of weaving Divine, Darling and Our Lady into an autobiographical narrative about his incarceration in Fresnes prison, Ohno and Kemp strive to invoke Genet, Divine and other ghostly figures in their choreographic explorations of autobiography. The relationship between possession by the dead and notions of gendered corporeal identity is, however, manifested in very different ways between Paris, Tokyo and London. In this essay, I will explore how different annals of Divine are told in different socio-political contexts. I want to suggest that the solipsism of Divine’s masturbatory saga is reconstructed by both Ohno and Kemp as a danced address to dead partners, in which a spectral sense of autobiography is designed to open up subjectivity to an essentially ethical relationship with absent bodies.

Genet’s dance, Divine’s ballet Dance features regularly in Our Lady of the Flowers. Louis Culafroy, who is to become Divine, absorbs the image of a ballerina and thereby learns to dance: ‘His every act was served by gestures necessitated not by the act itself, but by a choreography that transformed his life into a perpetual ballet’ (Genet, 1990, p. 130). Culafroy/Divine’s choreography is a form of autobiography in which Vaslav Nijinsky, Jean Börlin and Serge Lifar have fleeting cameos. These dancing figures are bit players called onto the larger stage of Divine’s love affair with Darling, and her rivalry with Our Lady of the Flowers. The dancing motif is reinforced when, living in a garret on the Rue Caulaincourt, Divine looks out onto a cemetery, which she imagines to be dancing in the moonlight: The light was such that one could clearly discern, beneath the grass of the graves and beneath the marble, the spectral unrest of the dead. … It would dance, that is, the wind stirred the grass and the cypresses. It would dance, that is, it was melodic and its body moved like a jellyfish. Divine’s relationship with the cemetery: it had worked its way into her soul, somewhat as certain sentences work their way into a text, that is, a letter here, a letter there. The cemetery within her was present at cafés, on the boulevard, in jail, under the blankets, in the pissoir. (ibid., pp. 89–90)


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Divine’s communion with the dancing cemetery is presented here as a form of ecstatic necrophilia—it penetrates her and dominates her ‘soul’.


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This erotic obsession with death is a recurrent theme in Genet’s fragmented narrative. Our Lady of The Flowers begins with Divine’s funeral, then intertwines with Genet’s own saga of being imprisoned in Fresnes, and finishes with the execution of Our Lady. Throughout the book, and across the various stories being told, masturbation is privileged as an act of spectral creativity, with explicit emphasis placed on the autoeroticism of autobiography. When Darling deserts Divine, it is telling that she should call on ghostly lovers, invoking their momentary corporealization to accompany her masturbatory fantasies: With her head beneath the sheets, she would devise complicated debauches, involving two, three, or four persons, in which all the partners would arrange to discharge in her, on her, and for her at the same time. … She was willing to be the single goal of all these lusts, and her mind strained in an effort to be conscious of them simultaneously as they drifted about in a voluptuousness poured in from all sides. Her body would tremble from head to foot. She felt personalities that were strange to her passing through her. (ibid., p. 125) Genet, the narrator of the book, also manifests himself through an erotic memorial. With his head under a rough prison blanket, he too ‘trembles’ as he devises the passage of personalities through him. Like Divine, then, Genet conjures other bodies into a performance of self, an autoerotic dance of/for/by ghostly lovers. Within this performative fabrication of identity, Genet consistently places emphasis on the gesture, not as communication, but as the means to achieve beauty in abjection. In Our Lady of the Flowers the primary performative is the ritual act of masturbation: ‘I have only to begin the gesture and a kind of unclean and supernatural transposition displaces the truth. Everything within me turns worshipper’ (ibid., p. 105). In Genet’s early works, this enthusiasm for the transformative aspects of masturbation has a particularly choreographic aspect. In the film Un chant d’amour, the guard stands transfixed as the prisoners dance delicate masturbatory solos in front of him (see chapter 12); in ’adame Miroir, Genet’s only ballet, the main pas de deux between a sailor and his image is described as being ‘ extremely lustful. Erotic’ (2003, p. 4); and in the essay The Tightrope Walker, Genet advises Abdallah Bentaga to ‘dance! But with a hard-on’:


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Your body will have the arrogant vigour of a congested, irritated sex. That is why I advise you to dance in front of your image and to be in



This is a body dancing itself hard (and arousing the audience) in order to become its own image, which, paradoxically and impossibly, is the image seen by the Other. Throughout the text, Genet reiterates that the choreographic imperative of the tightrope walker is to identify with this reflected image, which nevertheless must always fail in its attempt at synthesis: ‘It is the desire for yourself—or your image—never satisfied’ (ibid., p. 79). As in the annals of Divine, desire is always returning to the body through the imagined gaze of the Other. The Tightrope Walker also explores the erotics of death, and the creation of beauty through a phantasmatic relationship with a dead body. Across several of Genet’s works, therefore, dancing is written as an act of self-becoming, yet always through the reflected, spectral desires of the Other, and this nexus linking masturbation, self-creation and abjection provides a major theme for alternative choreographic re-workings of his texts.

Kazuo Ohno: Divinariane and Admiring La Argentina If you wish to dance a flower, you can mime it and it will be everyone’s flower, banal and uninteresting; but if you place the beauty of that flower and the emotions which are evoked by it into your dead body, then the flower you create will be true and unique and the audience will be moved. (Ohno, quoted in Viala and Masson-Sekine, 1988, p. 23) Butoh, the Japanese post-war dance form initiated by the work of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, has a fabled birth in bestial masturbation and homosexual rape. The performance commonly cited as the first butoh work is Hijikata’s 1959 production Kinjiki, in which Yoshito Ohno, Kazuo’s teenage son, slowly crushed a live chicken between his thighs, before being ‘sodomized’ by Hijikata in darkness. The following year Hijikata choreographed Divinariane with Ohno senior. There is little existing description of the piece, but the photographer William Klein took pictures of Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno in the backstreets of the Ginza district of Tokyo, the former in a black hood and the latter garlanded with flowers. Kazuo Ohno stresses that the piece was not so much a danced version of Our Lady of the Flowers, as a creative encounter with


love with it. You can’t get out of it: it is Narcissus who is dancing. But this dance is only your body’s attempt to identify with itself with your image as the spectator experiences it. (ibid., p. 77)


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I did not know Genet’s work, but Hijikata told me, ‘You will be Divine, you will be a transvestite.’ And without having read Genet, without understanding him, I became Divine. I often wonder if I could have done it had I understood … but I had a premonition of another world. This performance was my encounter with Genet, my encounter with Hijikata, my encounter with myself. I cannot explain the word ‘encounter’, and I do not want to. My dance is an encounter with Mankind, an encounter with Life. But I cannot forget that we all sleep upon Death, and that our lives are carried by the thousands of dead that came before us and who we will soon join. (ibid., pp. 24–5) Whereas Kazuo Ohno encounters Genet through premonition, Hijikata had read Our Lady of the Flowers, and this piece marks the beginning of a continuing citation of Genet within butoh performance.2 Hijikata choreographed Butoh Genet for Mitsutaka Ishii in 1967, who himself presented a work the following year called O-Genet Sho, which also featured Kazuo Ohno. There have since been many choreographies of Genet’s novels and plays by Japanese artists, and when butoh gained popularity in Europe and North America in the 1980s, owing in part to Ohno’s performances of Admiring La Argentina at international festivals, the importance of Genet’s work as a touchstone for the form remained. In 2002, Lee Adams, a British performance artist and butoh dancer, made a series of works using Genet’s texts, including The Batchelor Stripped Bare, which he described as ‘the bastard lovechild of a drunken three-way fuck between Marcel Duchamp, Jean Genet and Tatsumi Hijikata in the car park of Club Dada at closing time’.3 Ohno, unlike Adams, does not emphasize the homosexuality of Genet’s writing in his performance of Divine, although most reviews refer to Ohno’s androgyny as something that unsettles normative perceptions of gender.4 The homoerotic content of Genet’s work, in particular the erotic deconstruction of conventional masculinity, was exploited by the founders of butoh as part of a rebellion against social conformity per se, rather than as an expression of gay identity. Butoh emerged at the same time that a wide range of performance artists in Japan were presenting extreme bodies as a way of protesting against the polite acceptance of US domination.5 In his 1968 piece Revolt of the Flesh, Hijikata dances with a large prosthetic penis attached to his loins, and his masturbatory convulsions are indications of a body ecstatically struggling against oppression and colonization. Homosexuality, and the


Genet’s work. He explains:


centrality of autoeroticism within Genet’s accounts of dancing bodies, is thus distilled by Hijikata into a focus on criminality and anti-social disorder. Ohno’s rebellion is more personal than Hijikata’s. His encounter with Genet, and in particular with Our Lady of the Flowers, is akin to a corporeal seance. Ohno is not interested in a literal rendition of Genet’s character, but rather in an encounter with Divine as an exploration of death in life, as a haunting that is played out in his dance. Like Genet, Ohno’s admiration of flowers blooms in this overlapping space of vitality and mortality: As I’m constantly telling you, a flower’s beauty is eye-catching. It entices me to follow it down that stairway into the afterlife, for the world of flowers and the world of the dead are but one. … No longer fettered by my everyday self, I’m dancing freely amongst the spirits of the dead. (Ohno and Ohno, 2004, pp. 282–3) Kazuo Ohno’s most renowned work is Admiring La Argentina which conjures a bouquet of dead choreographers. Ohno saw La Argentina (the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé) dancing in Tokyo in 1929, and nearly fifty years later, at the age of 71, he choreographed a solo about his experience of her performance. Hijikata directed the premiere in 1977, and suggested that Ohno should revisit the figure of Divine for the opening of the piece. Ohno then proceeded to manifest other ghosts—Mary Wigman and, of course, La Argentina—but Yoshito Ohno argues that the piece was not a representation of their lives, but rather an elaboration of Kazuo’s life through his opening to them, primarily through a slippage between his body and La Argentina’s spectre: ‘I’m never sure whether Kazuo is quietly possessing her spirit, or if La Argentina herself has entered his body. One has the impression that he dances both for her and with her’ (ibid., p. 166). Reviewing a performance in New York in 1981, Mindy Aloff suggests that La Argentina was evoked not through Ohno’s dancing, ‘but through the way he suggested what kind of performer she was. What a strange sight it is to see a ghost courtesy of an elderly man wearing a pink dress …’ (Aloff, 1982, p. 48).6 Although Ohno’s body of work is perhaps the least erotically charged of all his peers (many butoh pieces are sexually explicit), this replaying of femininity across his male body, as a series of remembered lovers enter and animate him, recalls the masturbatory phantasmagoria of Divine’s lovers as she dances under the sheets in Montmartre while Genet




Martin Hargreaves

performs his own ‘solo’ under the Fresnes prison blanket. The uncanny visitation by lost lovers and heroines, through the androgynous choreography of an elderly body, is Ohno’s attempt to find life in decay and to present beauty through the return of ghosts. In 1967, ten years before Ohno’s premiere, Genet wrote in the essay ‘That Strange Word …’ of a theatre which would occupy the same ground as a cemetery and feature a funeral mime retelling the life and death of the corpses buried there. Ohno’s work seeks to occupy the same liminal space as Genet’s graveyard theatre, as he repeatedly digs and levels the graves of dead dancers through the gestural production of his life. Similarly, Lindsay Kemp’s encounter with Genet calls upon many departed bodies to occupy his stage. In Flowers, Nijinsky, Isadora Duncan, Robert Helpmann, and even Shirley Temple are beckoned to dance again. As Nadine Meisner has suggested, ‘the dead and the legendary populate his mind like guardian angels’ (2002, p. 40). Unlike Ohno, however, Kemp is interested in imitation and falsification, and his choreography tells lies in order to fabricate more honest truths.

Lindsay Kemp: Flowers Christopher Innes remembers Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers as beginning with ‘a scene of mass masturbation, orgasm and crucifixion performed to pulsating lights and musical rhythms … overwhelming the spectator with audio-visual effects and images of perverse tenderness, sexual violence and spiritual cruelty ‘ (1993, p. 122). Kemp himself has stated: ‘The curtain goes up and they see all these men wanking off. Imagine the reactions of all those ladies who thought they were coming to see a horticultural show’ (Kemp, quoted in Senelick, 2000, p. 410). This incendiary masturbatory prologue was followed by a spectacular choreographed narrative, composed of mime, ballet and popular dance forms, and based on characters and scenes which Kemp had culled from Our Lady of the Flowers. David Haughton, a long-time collaborator of Kemp’s, suggests, however, that as Flowers continued to evolve through its many performances, it moved away from the source novel as ‘Lindsay replaced Genet as Divine dreaming up these fantasies’.7 One of Kemp’s original aims in using Genet as a springboard for his own reveries was to locate ready-made images of homosexuality for public performance. In the initial post-legalization period in Britain in the 1970s, Kemp wanted to celebrate his gay identity, and Flowers, as the late filmmaker Derek Jarman notes, was a crucial work in this respect, ‘He [Kemp] did, after all, adopt Genet’s work—work that was most easily


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I didn’t have a problem about living my life honestly, because I didn’t have anything to hide. And of course … that was the life that I took to the stage with me, with Flowers particularly. It was an openness and a truth, and I know that it was actually seeing Flowers that did change people’s opinion about the gay situation. I think it did help make that taboo subject acceptable, obviously in a very small way, but I do like to be of use—a healer of the spirits, a doctor to help make you smile, which is the purpose of the artist, isn’t it? (Kemp, quoted in Robertson, 1996, p. 39) Kemp’s claim that Flowers revealed the truth of ‘the gay situation’ needs to be qualified. The piece was not simply about spiritual healing and/or laughter. The gay identity he presented was not at all assimilationist—a queer black mass and orgiastic cannibalism being some of the spectacles on offer. Peter Williams, watching the performance at the Roundhouse in 1977, approvingly remarked that it ‘seemed to exude the depraved atmosphere and stench of Genet’s vision of a twilit underworld and its denizens’ (1977, p. 34). And Fiona Burnside, watching a revival at Sadler’s Wells ten years later, observed that ‘Genet’s theatre reveals itself as the characters are destroyed by their creator … in a welter of stage blood’ (1987, p. 17). It seems unlikely therefore that Genet was raided by Kemp for affirmative or truthful images of gay men, just as it seems improbable that Flowers was read by audiences as either completely positive or entirely honest. Rather than a banal didactic piece about the gay situation based in theatrical realism, Kemp and company revelled in excessive superficiality, wild transvestism, melodramatic camp and, occasionally, ridiculous ironic flippancy. While Flowers certainly did have something serious to say about homosexual desire and identity, it did not do so through the language of expressive truth. It needs to be remembered that Kemp was part of a postlegalisation, pre-AIDS generation, which saw great artistic and political optimism in the increased visibility of male homosexuality. However, the truth of the gay situation entirely depended on whatever series of falsehoods you wanted to stage: the truth was in the staging, not in whatever was conjectured to lie beneath it, or with how it supposedly related to notions of authenticity. As Kemp argues in relation to his representation of Carmen Miranda, the falseness of his jewels is hardly the point:


understood by gay people’ (1987, p. 6). Kemp seems to concur with this:

I feel sorry for those who regard me as superficial simply because I’m wearing fake jewels. But … they missed something didn’t they? You


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Kemp’s comments have direct parallels with Genet’s affirmation of gesture as the means to transform debasement into beauty, and reflect Genet’s pleasure in fabricating glamour from abjection. There is, however, a contentious relationship between these aesthetic transpositions and the notion of constructing gay identities. Our Lady of the Flowers certainly documents the subcultural rites and loves of gay men as intrinsically creative in the face of social ostracism, but it also valorizes betrayal, murder and cruelty, and argues against the possibility of community between homosexuals. Leo Bersani (1995) has considered the debates concerning Genet’s status as an iconic gay writer in some detail. For him, readings which emphasize Genet’s reframing of dirt as beauty, and abjection as glamour (which, I suggest, constitute a major theme of Kemp’s choreographic reworkings of Genet), are not as political as they seem. On the contrary, they offer, he claims, a spectacular image of the transgressive gay outlaw, which dominant culture has little difficulty in appropriating. Bersani is too pessimistic here. Audiences do not remain immune to what they gaze upon. Kemp’s deliberately outré stylizations engage the audience, not merely as spectators, but as participants in carnivalesque inversions of identity. As Innes notes à propos of Flowers: ‘In Genet’s terms, it became a true image precisely because the spectacle was fake. If it works, the challenge to the imagination involves the audience more deeply in the action than any conventionally illusionistic presentation could’ (1993, p. 124). The involvement that Innes points to here is caused by Kemp’s attempt at the impossible retelling of multiple annals, including those of Divine, so that his masturbatory opus can extend to address others in his ‘honest’ performance of his ‘false’ self. This uncanny and ambiguous space is the point where the respective approaches of Kemp and Ohno converge. Both use Genet as a means of opening up subjectivity to a polyphonic whirl of bodies, both fleshy and spectral. Kemp and Ohno narrate Divine’s death order to imagine what the potentials for life are. The annals they choose to choreograph are intended to engage with social and political bodies and to reframe gender, sexuality and identity as phantasmatic and drifting categories produced by masturbatory reverie. Genet asserts that his words should be trivial and invisible in the face of Divine’s saga. Likewise, Ohno and Kemp risk the ephemera of dancing bodies so that her demise can bloom on their transformational stages, which inhabit a ghostly space between theatre and the cemetery, and life and death.


know, I think I was the first to play drag seriously—even my Carmen Miranda was serious. (Kemp, quoted in Robertson, 1996, p. 39)



1. ‘I shall speak to you about Divine, mixing masculine and feminine as my mood dictates’ (Genet, 1990, p. 61). 2. Hijikata was close friends with Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, a poet and translator of Genet. Stephen Barber records that Hijikata had, prior to Divinariane, written a ‘Genet-inspired manifesto’ which evoked ‘the imagery of a self-willed incarceration and of a deviant, sexually-imbued criminality’ (2004, p. 119). 3. In publicity material for the National Review of Live Art, February 2002. 4. Ohno has linked this with Genet’s insistence on the intensity of living as both genders (see Odenthal, 1996, p. 26). 5. Although the occupation officially ended in 1952, the Security Treaty between the United States and Japan was seen by many as a further example of US colonialism. See Stephen Barber (2000) for a discussion of the wider body politics of artistic protest in post-war Japan. 6. In 1970, Genet danced in front of a group of the Black Panthers in a pink negligée, an act which was interpreted by Black Panther David Hilliard as a statement about sexual fluidity (see White, 1993, p. 608). 7. Personal email to the author.

Works cited Aloff, M. ‘Reviews’, Dance Magazine (January 1982), 45–50. Barber, S. ‘Butoh’s First Images’, 20 November 2000 http://www.poeticinhalation. com/butoh.html. —— Jean Genet (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). Bersani, L. Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Burnside, F. ‘Words versus Gestures’, Dance Theatre Journal, 5: 3b (1987), 16–17. Genet, J. Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). —— Fragments of the Artwork, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Innes, C. Avant Garde Theatre 1892–1992 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Jarman, D. ‘Foreword’, in A. Wilms, Lindsay Kemp & Company (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1987), pp. 5–8. Meisner, N. ‘Lindsay Kemp: How the Lost Boy of Dance Found his Feet’, Independent, 28 January 2002, p. 40. National Review of Live Art, Publicity Material, February 2002. Odenthal, J. ‘The Human Being Is Not the Centre Of The Universe—On The 90th Birthday Of Kazuo Ohno’, Ballet International (November 1996), 26–7. Ohno, K. and Y. Ohno. Kazuo Ohno’s World: From Without and Within, trans. John Barrett (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Robertson, A. ‘Pied Piper: Lindsay Kemp talks to Allen Robertson’, Dance Now, 5: 3 (1996), 36–40. Senelick, L. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).


Notes


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Viala, J. and N. Masson-Sekine. Butoh: Shades of Darkness (Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1988). White, E. Genet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Williams, P. ‘Wilde Flowers: The Lindsay Kemp Company at the Roundhouse’, Dance and Dancers (May 1977), 34–5.


9 Jean, Ron, Franko and Me: Genet, Body Art and Abjection

Nothing must be protected so much as a little heap of rubbish. (Genet, 1963, p. 168) In 1989, the feminist artist Barbara Kruger produced a text and image collage called Your Body is a Battleground. Two decades later on 23 May 2003, Abbas Amini, a Kurdish poet and asylum seeker living in Nottingham (UK), ended an eight-day protest against his extradition to Iran by sewing up his eyes, ears and mouth. The image was both horrific and scandalous, and unsurprisingly attracted much in the way of media attention. The public was, at turns, fascinated and appalled by Amini’s willingness to desecrate his own body and to use it as a tool for political resistance. The title of Kruger’s painting seems increasingly prophetic, and many performance artists now regard the body as a more effective and powerful tool for political expression than traditional sites of artistic engagement such as the canvas, page or stage. The art historian Amelia Jones offers a useful explanation for the political significance of the body in contemporary performance art: Body art does not strive toward utopian redemption but, rather, places the body/self within the realm of the aesthetic as a political domain (articulated through the aestheticization of the particularized body/ self, itself embedded in the social) and so unveils the hidden body that secured the authority of modernism … [I]n this regard body art … provides the possibility for radical engagements that can transform the way we think about meaning and subjectivity (both the artist’s and our own). (1998, pp. 13–14)


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For Jones, the body in performance art is not political because of the way it may (or may not) communicate a coherent political message; rather, its political charge resides in its capacity to highlight what dominant discourses are so concerned to hide: the performativity of the body. To use the body for progressive political purposes, argues Jones, is to draw attention to the constructed, non-essentialized aspects of identity and, at the same time, to search for an alternative, more concrete ‘site of intersubjectivity’ (ibid., p. 14). According to Jones, the presence of the body in performance art—what she variously refers to as ‘instantiation’ (ibid., p. 12) and ‘proximity’ (ibid., p. 50)—implicates both artist and spectator in a profound phenomenological experience, which, for her, has the potential to transform identity through a non-rational, affective mode of exchange. While Jones correctly points out that, since its beginnings in the early 1960s, body art has always been deeply political, she also realizes that a new set of circumstances—the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s; the easy availability of cosmetic and plastic surgery; the developments of new bio-practices and technologies—has forced body artists to explore alternative strategies of resistance. The theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff makes a similar point. In his view, the contemporary obsession with ideal notions of health, beauty, and fitness is deeply conservative in that it produces disciplined and docile forms of subjectivity. For him, the body in the twenty-first century is a body under siege: ‘Your body is not itself, nor is mine. It is under siege from the pharmaceutical, aerobic, dietetic, liposuctive, calorie controlled, cybernetic world of postmodernism’ (1995, p. 1). In this essay, we want to explore how the dominant aesthetic and political assumptions that, in Mirzoeff’s words, ‘lay siege’ to the body, are deliberately resisted by contemporary performance art. We do this by looking at the extreme body practices of Ron Athey and Franko B, both of whom celebrate the abject and diseased corporeality of the queer outcast. A study of the novels and plays of Jean Genet is crucial to this project. For, as we argue, Genet’s representation of the abject body in his novels and plays of the 1940s and 1950s articulates a stunningly original technique of transgression that both Athey and Franko B have drawn upon and developed in their work. In keeping with the impropriety of the subject matter, this academic essay is punctuated with a series of personal confessions in which Paul Woodward pays a performative debt to Jean, Ron and Franko, brothers in abjection past and present, who have changed his life on three occasions. In her 1980 publication Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the French theorist Julia Kristeva argues that clean and proper (normative)


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subjectivity is dependent upon the rejection of the abject body and its fluids: ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself. … I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. … [R]efuse and corpses show me what I must permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 3). For Kristeva, the return of the abject is traumatic, since it forces the subject to confront death: ‘On the edge of non-existence, of a reality which if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture’ (ibid., p. 2). While Kristeva supplies a good phenomenological account of the disgust provoked by the abject, her study is politically dangerous. Her commitment to what is an ostensibly Lacanian reading of the abject means that she overlooks completely the socially constructed aspects of abjection. By doing so, she fails to see how, as Judith Butler cautions, dominant cultures equate abject bodies with excluded others. In her 1993 book Bodies That Matter, Butler corrects Kristeva’s interpretation by drawing attention to the ways in which abjection has historically served as both metaphor and metonymy for producing supposedly inferior and outcast identities. At various times and places, Butler claims that women, queers, Blacks and immigrants have been designated as dirty, disgusting others, and thus not worthy of inclusion as ‘proper subjects’ by majority discourse. Recent examples of ethnic cleansing in Europe and Africa provide tragic support for Butler’s thesis. However, if abjection is, as Butler suggests, a mechanism used by clean and proper society to protect itself from contamination by ‘abject others’, then it can also be exploited for the very opposite purpose. This is because, continues Butler, the clean and proper (social) body needs the abject to exist. In her view, the abject other is a subject that is paradoxically included through his/her exclusion. For Butler, this situation provides the minority subject with hitherto unimaginable powers. By seeking abjection rather than propriety, Butler claims that the oppressed subject has the ability to resist the agonistic tie that binds him/her to proper society. In his novels and early plays, Genet’s heroes refuse to stay clean: they deliberately seek out abjection and celebrate it. In The Thief’s Journal, the narrator’s love for the flea-ridden beggar Salvador allows him to experience a state of perverted, ecstatic glory:


Genet, Body Art and Abjection

My relations with Salvador lasted six months. It was not the most intoxicating but rather the most fecund of loves. I had managed to love that sickly body, grey face, and ridiculously sparse beard. … [L]ice


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In Genet’s inverted world, abject objects are granted quasi-religious sanctity. Through the power of the poetic imagination, they become noble and pure, mystic gifts to offer to God: ‘My imagination is plunged into abjection but at least on that score it’s noble, it’s pure’ (ibid., p. 145). Throughout his works, Genet identifies a need for marginalized others to construct and perform alternative rituals as a way of resisting a world that has rejected them. In Miracle of the Rose and The Maids, he describes initiation rites involving urine, excrement, saliva, and sperm. For Genet—and this is a theme that runs throughout his work—the desire to lose oneself in the abject functions as an inverted rite of passage. Instead of existing as a negative state through which society ultimately renews itself, as it does in the work of anthropologists such as Arnold Van Gannep and Victor Turner, abjection, for Genet, is a process that disturbs and interrupts the value system of dominant society: ‘Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. … The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. But—criminals are remote from you—they turn away … from the world and its laws. Theirs smells of sweat, sperm and blood’ (ibid., p. 5).

The first time As a gay teenager growing up in English suburbia, Genet’s works jolted me out of a heterosexual world, which offered little but demoralization and loneliness. Reading the novels of Genet, often secretly at night, hidden from friends and family, gave me a much-needed and deeply desired invitation to inhabit an outcast universe, and to find a sense of pride through abjection. In this way, Genet changed my life for the first time, rescuing me from the fear of being perceived by others and myself as different, ugly, and wrong. His words challenged me to re-make my identity by resolutely rejecting a ‘world that had rejected me’ (Genet, 1967, p. 71). Genet’s path was empowering—it offered strategies of resistance, existential weapons.


inhabited us. … The lice were precious. They were both our shame and our glory. (1967, p. 19)

Genet’s exploration of abjection as an instrument for liberation continues in his late theatre. However, there is a crucial difference here. Whereas the novels are predominantly concerned with resistance on a micro-level, the plays tackle macro-issues such as revolution, racism and anti-colonial revolt. In The Blacks and The Screens, the acceptance of abjection is an important step in the development of a revolutionary consciousness.



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OMMOU: The more you lost yourself in the stones and in the woods, the deeper you sank into another region to which it wasn’t easy for us to descend … [the more] you and your admirable partner taught us how one must lose oneself. (ibid., p. 166; translation modified) Saïd and Leïla’s voyage into nothingness has positive consequences for village life. When the villagers follow their example, outcasts and underdogs, such as the prostitutes of the brothel and the Nettle Family, who were treated as scapegoats under colonialist rule, are now welcomed into the community. In contrast to the colonialist concept of the social, which is rooted in identity and sameness, the Arabs are, during the revolution at least, willing to accept the traumatic presence of the outsider and outcast. They have come to terms with the abject and do not seek to expel those who purportedly embody it. The political and ethical significance that Genet accords the abject in his late theatre creates a very different version of revolutionary change from the one commonly associated with progressive western thought. Where left-wing revolution in the West has traditionally been associated with rationality, totality and transparency, Genet’s view of revolutionary praxis is characterized by an attempt to cope with abjection, that is to say, with difference and alterity. Or, as Edward Said would have it, with everything that ‘will not settle down … or [be] domesticated’ (1995, p. 241).

The second time


In The Blacks, for instance, resistance occurs when the onstage Blacks heed Archibald’s instructions to become what they are defined as being in white society: abject: ‘Let Negroes negrify themselves. Let them persist to the point of madness in what they’re condemned to be, in their ebony, in their smell, in their yellow eyes, in their cannibal tastes’ (1960, p. 42). The same process is in operation in The Screens. Saïd and Leïla’s abject journey to ‘the land of the monster’ (Genet, 1963, p. 96) is what acts as a catalyst for the anti-colonial revolution. Towards the end of the play, Ommou says:

Genet changed my life for the second time when I sought to use theatre as a way of protesting against the infamous Clause 28, an authoritarian act passed by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1988, which attempted to prevent local authorities from spending public money in ways that were deemed to promote a positive view of homosexuality. As a young gay man, I refused to be silenced. Adapting Genet’s short film Un chant d’amour for a piece of physical theatre provided a perfect allegory for the problems faced by



the gay community in the aftermath of Clause 28. Like the prisoners in the film, gay people were now struggling to communicate through concrete walls and disciplinary barriers. In my performance an emphasis on the body was crucial: it provided a site from which I could launch a corporeal protest against a bill, which attempted to brand homosexuality as shameful and abject. The early sequences of the production celebrated conventional images of homoerotic desire as pristine, pumped-up gym torsos sweated through the rigours of a physical theatre piece. However, as the show progressed, the Athena posterboy look, so prevalent in assimilationist gay culture at the time, turned into a queer nightmare of abjection. Baptismal rites in urine and vomit took over the performance as we, the prisoners and performers, explored a realm beyond the linguistic and disciplinary structures which served to silence and suffocate the outcast. In one sequence, the skin on my wrist was broken and real blood flowed into our theatre of abjection. I still carry the scar of the experience. Why did it seem so important to perform these extreme acts in public? The example of Genet’s convicts provides the answer: using our bodies to celebrate abject processes meant that our queer identities could not be assimilated into heterosexual systems of representation. One way to interpret Genet’s shift from the novel to the theatre in the 1950s is to see it as an attempt to communicate abjection in a more concrete and visceral fashion. However, even in The Blacks, a play where he deliberately celebrates ‘abject’ black bodies, Genet’s theatre does not make the abject manifest itself in all its brute ‘thereness’. In all Genet’s plays, obscene acts always occur offstage. Despite his radical attack on theatricality, Genet was reluctant, or perhaps unable to transcend the absence inherent in the theatrical sign. This commitment to the sign separates Genet’s works from the first generation of body artists who, in the 1960s, were more interested in presentation (non-semiotic performance) than representation (semiotic performance). Like Genet, Carolee Schneeman, Gina Pane and Chris Burden were aware that the body was always already constructed and performed. However, from their point of view, the important point was not to place the body in representation (as Genet does), but to present it as an object to be read and/or experienced as a thing in itself. Where Schneeman’s generation of body artists used the body to denounce the commodification of the art object and to subvert conventional representations of gender and sexuality, contemporary practitioners such as Franko B and Ron Athey use the body for different ends. For them, the body exists as an intimate site from which to launch a series of investigations into the threats posed by science, technology and fear of disease, primarily AIDS. They do this by focusing on the body that


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twenty-first-century society is so reluctant to face: the abject body, the body that is vulnerable to death and decay. In this way, they respond to, and further develop, the legacy of abjection that Genet has bequeathed to queer culture. Taking Genet as their role model, Franko B and Ron Athey use art to reject a society, which, they feel, has abandoned them. Given their traumatic, formative experiences with institutionalized religion, it is no surprise that Franko B and Athey, like Genet, should look to Christian rites, rituals and iconography as ways of structuring and informing their work. Nevertheless, the perverse, abject rituals that Athey and Franko B very deliberately create ought not to be seen as mere decoration or simple autobiography. Instead, they are intended as powerful strategies of resistance; performances that allow contemporary queer culture to find a form through which it can express its difference and find a space for community. In both cases—and this is where their tactics differ markedly from those of Genet—the abject rituals they perform are not theatricalized. Rather, they are inscribed in and on their bodies. They seek to communicate an experience of the Real, the unsymbolizable space beyond representation. Borrowing Genet’s strategy of appropriating, and thus perverting the symbols of clean and proper society, Franko B’s 1996 performance piece I’m Not Your Babe explores the relationship between stigmata, exclusion and transcendence. In the production, blood welled from a catheter inserted into his forearm and, in the closing sequence of images, he was manipulated by a team of assistants in neutral white boiler suits who bound him up in chains, then hoisted his bleeding body above the stage area. Such a spectacle is full of religious significance, yet reconfigured from a queer perspective. Franko B’s constricted, blood-drenched body at once suggests the fate of early Christian martyrs crucified in inverted configurations and, at the same time, illustrates the alienated and dispossessed body that Mirzoeff mentions. The body becomes both a site of protest and celebration, and the ability to endure pain testifies to Franko B’s joyful acceptance of his outcast state. Like a character from a novel or film by Genet (but in real time), Franko B creates uniquely queer rituals for both himself and his audience to participate in. By doing so, he insists on the existential and corporeal right of the queer subject to exist in a world that is hostile to his/her very being. Athey also adopts a strategy of provocative resistance. In his 1993—94 work Four Scenes from a Harsh Life, he created an alternative crucifixion by inserting needles into the skin around his skull, whilst meat hooks punctured the skin on his arms. In his queer(ed) Pietà, the image of





Saint Sebastian was reconfigured as a nude woman whose skin was pierced with needle-like instruments. Standing in as Saint Irene, Athey further upset the gender roles associated with this iconic image by removing the needles and tending to the wounded body of ‘Sebastian’. Athey comments that his work is akin to ‘a public sacrifice, I think it is really parallel to doing penance’ (quoted in Myers, 1995, p. 61). For Athey, then, performance is efficacious in the anthropological sense of the word: the act of partaking in the ritual alters him. As in Genet’s work, this transformation requires the acceptance of the abject body. Paradoxically, this confrontation with the most material of matter produces a state of transcendence and redemption. By seeking the abject and loving it, Athey, like a Genetian saint, distances himself from the values of heteronormative society, and overcomes his shame. For the French critic Jean Gitenet, Genet’s abject heroes do not simply oppose society on sexual and gender grounds; they oppose it on existential grounds, too. According to Gitenet, death is the supreme point to which all of Genet’s work leads: The cleavage point, this leap into the void, which is the centre of Genet’s theatre and sacred intention, is not to be found in the antithetical categories of sacred/profane world, illusion/disillusion or destruction/creation. It is, rather, to be found in a dimension which at once affirms and denies both terms of these pairs, and this dimension is DEATH. (1979, p. 176; original italics) In Gitenet’s view, death is not a negative moment in Genet’s theatre. Rather, like Artaud’s notion of cruelty, it is intensely therapeutic, an experience that combines negation and affirmation. Patrick Campbell and Helen Spackman recontextualize and historicize this point in their 1998 essay ‘With/out An-aesthetic; The Terrible Beauty of Franko B’. In their view, performers such as Franko B and Ron Athey take their audiences beyond the pleasure principle in an attempt to find alternative ways of coming to terms with death and disease. Athey is particularly challenging in this respect since both he and many of his collaborators are HIV positive. In his mid-1990s piece Deliverance, Athey made a strenuous effort to come to terms with his own mortality and abjection, a theme which he admits overshadows his work: ‘I’m mortified with the idea of dying and, in particular, of an ugly AIDS death. Every day the clock is ticking and I’m aware I’m dying’ (Athey, 1995). In Deliverance, male bodies were wrapped in cloth, and littered a wasteland of sand and grain. This was a striking stage image


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that recalled the worst ravages of the AIDS pandemic, when bodies, abandoned and cocooned, piled up in hospital mortuaries. The piece closed with a long protracted funeral rite in which women playing mothers led a ceremony of mourning through a landscape of loss, which, though chilling, achieved its own form of beauty. Athey’s response to becoming a pariah figure was typically Genetian. Through performance, he transformed death and disease into objects of Eros, providing the spectators with a beautiful and poetic gift. The desire to celebrate loss as a means of coming to terms with death is also a major element in Franko B’s performance practice. Explaining why he wounds himself in public, he comments that, The idea of the wound, the cutting up, the covering up of things that come out of the body, closing up the holes, is to do with everyday shame. It’s impossible to articulate the anger, fear, grief, loss of our lives. … It’s like showing my insides. … It’s to do with death, something you don’t express so much. (Quoted in Campbell and Spackman, 1998, p. 62; original italics) By showing his wounded body in performance, Franko B offers his own gift to the audience: he invites it to partake in a queer rite of passage and to confront its anxieties about death and dying. There is alchemy at work here, and the experience provoked is very definitely intended to be life–affirming. Divine’s death in Our Lady of the Flowers resonates with the key features of contemporary body art: Divine died yesterday in a pool of her vomited blood which was so red that, as she expired, she had the supreme illusion that this blood was the visible equivalent of the black hole which a gutted violin, seen in a judge’s office in the midst of a hodge-podge of pieces of evidence, revealed with dramatic insistence, as does a Jesus the gilded chancre where gleams His flaming Sacred Heart. (1964, p. 67)



As the destitute transvestite dies of consumption, he transcends the abjection and desolation of his own death. The dark blood he begins to haemorrhage becomes an indication of the black void—the inside of a violin—into which death will transport him. Simultaneously, however, in the very act of dying he manages to rise above death to celebrate the love of humanity. Divine’s blood becomes an affirmatory and defiant celebration of his deviant life and subversive love. Athey and Franko B


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thus perpetuate Genet’s legacy with their quasi-religious elevations of disease, decay and death.

After witnessing Franko B’ s performance of Oh Lover Boy in 2001, I was left shaken but exhilarated. For a Franko B event, this was an unusually silent performance. He stood impassive and alone, bleeding in front of us on a giant white canvas. Watching his red blood cascade down, I became aware of my heart beating and the flow of blood rushing through my own body. It is impossible to tell how long the performance lasted. After his exit, the audience remained silent and stunned, until a young man knelt at the base of the canvas. It seemed to me that he was honouring the performance, paying thanks to the offering that Franko B had made for our benefit. Walking out of the venue, I was surprised to see that it had rained. As I stepped into puddles, the world seemed to be made of different fluids, each of them with their own beauty: rain, blood, piss, and semen. Not since I was a young man reading Genet for the first time had I experienced this sense of being transported from an abject universe into an alternate aesthetic realm. My outcast, abject body felt cleansed. The trauma of my own HIV positive diagnosis—the fear of decay, the pain of illness—suddenly drained away. I had moved from morbidity to affirmation. This, for me, was proof of Amelia Jones’ assertion that body art encounters can facilitate profound phenomenological experiences that transform identity both in and through affective exchange. My doctors can employ the medical discourses to help me rationalize my body’s battle with the HIV virus, yet it was my encounter with the live ritual of Franko B’s bleeding body, which triggered a non-rational and transformative response. This could only occur within the transactions created by body art, primarily, because it is able, through the liveness of the body, to challenge discursive meaning. Herein lay my true and greatest debt to Genet. Through his influence on these controversial and pioneering body artists, I realized, as I walked through the long London night, that Genet had changed my life for a third time.


The third time

Works cited Athey, R. Four Scenes from a Harsh Life, London, ICA, July 1994. —— ICA programme notes for Deliverance, London, ICA, December 1995. Butler. J. Bodies that Matter: The Discursive Limits of Sex (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Campbell, P. and H. Spackman. ‘With/out An-aesthetic; The Terrible Beauty of Franko B’, The Drama Review, 42: 4 (1998), 56–67. Franko, B. I’m Not Your Babe, London, ICA, December 1996. —— Oh Lover Boy, London, Beaconsfield, April 2001.


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Genet, J. The Blacks, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1960). —— The Screens, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). —— Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Anthony Blond, 1964). —— The Thief’s Journal, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Penguin, 1967). Gitenet, J. ‘Profane and Sacred Reality in Jean Genet’s Theatre’, trans. J. Vanpée, in Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds, P. Brooks and J. Halpern, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), pp. 172–7. Jones, A. Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. L. Roudinez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Mirzoeff, N. Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and The Ideal Figure (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Myers, J. ‘An Interview with Ron Athey’, TheatreForum, 6 (1995), 60–1. Said, E. ‘On Genet’s Late Work’, in Imperialism and Theatre, ed. J. Ellen Gainor (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 230–42.







Part IV


Key Productions





10 John Warrick

Anticipating the New York premiere of The Blacks in May 1961, translator Bernard Frechtman cautioned against the likely misinterpretation of Jean Genet’s latest work: ‘Those who see in the play only a gesture of hatred—which is indeed there—have stopped midway. They must push further. If they do, they will participate not only in a singular esthetic vision, but in a paradoxical meditation on the nature of power’ (1961, p. 3). Frechtman’s admonition anticipated a notably controversial reception of Genet’s play in the United States, where furious debates circulated among African American groups about the future of black politics and culture. Whereas most black activists advocated peaceful reform as a way of achieving equality, certain black radicals began to consider the role of organized violence as a more effective method for attaining full civil rights. The aggressive inclination of this growing element—formally recognized in the establishment of the Black Panther Party in October 1966—was evidently at issue in Genet’s play, which appeared to some critics to argue for the necessity of armed black revolt. Consequently, the emphasis that Frechtman placed on cool philosophical meditation was undermined by what some regarded as the text’s heated enthusiasm for displays of violence and hatred. Together, these conflicting facets of The Blacks drove the vitality of the New York production. Unsurprisingly, given its criticism of white racism and celebration of black revolt, the play was of immediate concern to black artists, who were at the time attempting to manufacture an empowering and culturally relevant theatre movement. While Genet’s play appears to celebrate black emancipation, many of New York’s black artists—most notably the playwright, Lorraine Hansberry in the Village Voice and the poet, Langston Hughes in a round-table discussion in the journal Negro Digest in 1965—adopted a less optimistic view of the work. For them, Genet’s


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abstract exploration of racial hatred, along with what they considered to be his irresponsible portrayal of ritualized brutality, endangered the progressive aims of an indigenous black theatre movement, a movement which, in their view, was not to be predicated on violent reprisal. According to Hansberry and Hughes, if theatre was to benefit the black community, it had to be specific, positive, and grounded in the reality of black experience. In spite of these initially negative reactions, however, the New York production of The Blacks made a significant contribution to the development of the African American theatre by inciting controversies of immense aesthetic and political consequence. This essay sets out to examine the dialectical impact of Genet’s play on the black American theatre movement in three stages. First, I explore the tensions provoked during the rehearsal process of the New York production; second, I analyse the reactions of contemporary black critics to the play; finally, I evaluate the production’s enduring influence on black American actors, managers and playwrights. A major source of tension in the 1961 production of The Blacks—and in Afro-American performance in general—was the role of the white theatre professional in an otherwise black theatre movement. While the stage action of the play presented African American actors, the playwright, the director, and an overwhelming majority of the audience, were Whites. Geraldine Lust, who held the American rights to The Blacks, originally sought involvement from French director Roger Blin in the hope of reproducing the Parisian premiere’s success. However, American-born Gene Frankel eventually won the position because he supposedly better ‘understood American Negro actors’ through an established work history with many of the preeminent black actors in New York (Little, 1972, p. 124). It was Frankel’s notoriously improvisational directing style that may have invited the turmoil that accompanied the play’s rehearsal process. Theatre critic Stuart Little recounts how Frankel used special improvisational exercises to evaluate essential qualities of Negritude when auditioning actors: ‘he ruled out an actor if there was a “trace of whiteness” in him’ (ibid., p. 125). Consequently, Frankel—a white director—was supposedly the sole eye capable of discerning a performer’s ethnic identity. Although it is difficult to criticize Frankel’s choice of actors (the cast included such accomplished performers as Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Cynthia Belgrave, Louis Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Godfrey M. Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordon), the racism inherent in his presumptuous and offensive casting policy nevertheless became problematic. Maya Angelou had been invited to audition by her close friend Max Roach, a black militant and composer of the original music for the New


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I disagreed. Black people could never be like Whites. We were different. More respectful, more merciful, more spiritual. … The Blacks was a white foreigner’s idea of a people he did not understand. Genet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man’s burden of greed and guilt, and which at the same time toted its own insufficiency. I threw the manuscript into a closet, finished with Genet and his narrow little conclusions. (ibid., p. 172) Angelou’s husband implored her to understand that ‘most black activists do not really want change. They want exchange. This play points to that likelihood. And our people need to face the temptation’ (ibid., p. 175). Although she reconsidered and ultimately participated in the production, Angelou’s original assessment of the script carried over to other members of the cast. In his co-authored autobiography Voices and Silences, James Earl Jones, for instance, describes how rehearsals degenerated into occasional expressions of hostility towards director Gene Frankel, in which the following exchange would inevitably occur: ‘ “What do you know about being black?” Gene would say, “What do you know about Genet?” ’ (Jones and Niven, 1993, p. 118). Although Jones alleged that he was not personally involved in these confrontations, Angelou corrects his account with a very precise memory of ‘[Jones] watch[ing] Frankel with fierce stares, reading his lips, scanning his hairline and chin, ear lobes and neck. Then suddenly James Earl would withdraw into himself with a slammed-door finality’ (1981, p. 177). For his part, Frankel either absorbed his cast’s hostility as the natural consequence of the work, or else he manipulated the anger to produce stronger performances. Stuart Little contends that Frankel deliberately placed himself in the role of surrogate audience to impersonate the white spectator upon whom the actors ‘could bounce their hatreds and


York production. It was only after a long audition that she admitted to Roach that she could not grasp the meaning of the play. Roach explained that Genet, who had spent time in French prisons, ‘understood the nature of imperialism and colonialism and how those two evils erode the natural good in people’ (Angelou, 1981, p. 171). However, Angelou distrusted The Blacks, and she reacted fiercely after noting the text’s declaration that ‘the oppressed would take over the positions of their former masters’:


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resentments’ (1972, p. 126). Jones recalls:

Frankel tried to exacerbate this sense of ‘emotional confrontation’ by inviting non-affiliated, black artist-activists to attend rehearsals. Ossie Davis and James Baldwin were regular visitors, and even conducted cast meetings to the deliberate exclusion of Frankel. While at the outset Frankel actually encouraged this activity, Baldwin, on realizing the detrimental effects of his presence in the rehearsal room, eventually disbanded the gatherings because they threatened to undermine the production. The reactions of the cast to Frankel suggest that he symbolized more than a surrogate for potential audiences: rather, he embodied the great gulf that existed between a philosophical, European text, and the socio-political realities experienced by the cast during the play’s New York run. The North American premiere of The Blacks took place at the St Mark’s Playhouse in Manhattan on 4 May 1961. In contrast to Roger Blin, who, in his initial production of the play in Paris in October 1959, situated the action within the context of European colonialism in Africa, Frankel was more concerned to make the text relevant to the pressing situation of race relations in the United States. Where Blin used mainly amateur actors from the French colonies (Les Griots), the cast in New York was made up of North American professional actors, all of whom were immersed in the particularities of black experience in the United States; and where Blin followed the musical score as dictated by the script, Frankel added American jazz to the original sound design. There were important scenographic differences between the productions, too. The costumes and set in Paris drew attention to European colonialism in Africa by having the actors dressed in white powdered wigs, calf-length stockings and frilled over-shirts, and by placing a thatched ‘hut’ on stage. Frankel, by contrast, avoided the historical and geographical specificity of Blin’s production by adopting a more abstract set design that highlighted the overt theatricality of the piece. Although European colonial costume was worn in New York, the actors also donned American evening gowns or tuxedos, and dark sweaters and jeans. The consequence of these changes in set and costume was to locate the


Gene himself called the drama a ‘hate therapy’ play which stimulated people in the audience to examine their own racial prejudices. He said that he deliberately played on the white sense of guilt, striving for an emotional rather than an intellectual confrontation of racial themes. (Jones and Niven, 1993, p. 118)


action of the play within the historical and geographical present, that is, within the immediate civil unrest of the United States in the 1960s. As such, the production veered from Frechtman’s call for a ‘single esthetic vision’ and ‘paradoxical meditation on the nature of power’, and became a vehicle that allowed urban black performers to express their outrage and anger at white society in the United States. Angelou recalls: ‘[I enjoyed] my role. I used the White Queen to ridicule mean white women and brutal white men who had too often injured me and mine’ (1981, p. 179). Maya Angelou’s account contrasts with Gene Frankel’s interpretation that the play served as ‘hate therapy’ for both actors and spectators. Instead, this therapy was embraced by the actors alone, and was neither accessible—nor even extended—to the overwhelmingly white audience. The production enjoyed considerable attention from reviewers, who generally recognized the piece as ceremony, but were confused by its plot structure. Howard Taubman, one of the few critical admirers of the text, noted that, ‘In form, it flows as freely as an improvisation, with fantasy, allegory and intimations of reality mingled into a weird, stirring unity’ (1961, p. 23). In a commentary that looked beyond the play’s ceremonial structure, the influential critic Harold Clurman recognized in the script a prescient social relevance: My own view—and it is a point I should like to emphasize—is that for all the anarchy and personal stress of Genet’s dramatic work it is social and ‘revolutionary’. The Blacks is not the kind of play of ‘social significance’ that we are accustomed to: it is not melioristic or benign. It is dangerously explosive; and that is one of its virtues. Most plays dealing with the race ‘problem’ (or prejudice) are pathetic, constructive, patient. (1961, pp. 447–8) Like Clurman, Norman Mailer, too, acknowledged the play as a deeply political work and claimed that it was ‘the truest and most explosive play anyone has yet written at all about the turn in the tide, and the guilt and horror in the white man’s heart as he turns to face his judge’ (1961, p. 14). Mailer’s reaction to the play ran in tandem with reviews by the black playwright Lorraine Hansberry in several issues of the Village Voice, and their dialogue regarding The Blacks did much to introduce the aims of black theatre—and indeed Genet’s usefulness to it—to the American public. However, unlike Mailer, Hansberry was dubious about the play’s political credentials. She discerned in Genet a disdain for the theatrical




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medium and frankly disclaimed any affinity with him:

According to Hansberry, The Blacks failed aesthetically and socially. Like Frankel, Hansberry believed that theatre’s primary aesthetic function was to create a satisfying communal experience. For her, Genet’s play, with its permeating vitriol and intentional cultivation of antagonism, was unsuccessful because it deliberately prevented communion between actors and spectators. In Hansberry’s view, Genet’s disdain for theatrical communion was a direct consequence of his rejection of social communion in general. Her final assessment of Genet categorized him as a paternalistic white writer, one who inappropriately and incorrectly presumed to speak for the experiences and aims of segregated black subjects. Imported to the United States, the danger was that this paternalism, conveyed through The Blacks, might harm the nascent Black American theatre movement there and push it towards unproductive and even potentially violent ends. Hansberry’s anxieties about the 1961 production of The Blacks were ultimately to prove unfounded. Not only did the publication in 2002 of the original 1956 preface to the play show the extent to which Genet was aware of the dangers of appropriation, but, as time passed and the play’s success became apparent, attitudes gradually shifted and allowed for more serious consideration of its thematic relevance and structural impact (see Chapter 5 by Carl Lavery and Chapter 6 by Clare Finburgh).1 Indeed by 1985, the academic and playwright Mance Williams would locate the inception of the black theatre movement in Genet’s ‘European’ play, noting that The Blacks made possible ‘more radical theatre forms that were to be therapeutic and participatory’ (1985, p. 3). Williams’ claims are startling, but if we are to grasp their significance, it is necessary to document the variety of ways in which Genet’s drama interacted with, and contributed to, the development of black theatre in the United States. In the second part of this essay, I describe the impact of The Blacks on Afro-American theatre by analysing the production’s success in establishing a permanent black acting corps, cultivating a white audience for black theatre productions, and developing a new generation of black playwrights.


[W]e are overwhelmed by our sense of his distrust of us; his refusal to honor our longings for communion. Presently we understand that he does not seem to believe that is what we do long for and so, now and again, he drops even the remnants of his regard, and flails at us. (1961, p. 10; original italics)



When an actor in The Blacks got a better paying Broadway part, he or she was free to take it, but could usually return to the cast of The Blacks at any time, should Broadway not pan out—since there was almost always someone else leaving for an uptown venture. (1967, p. 238) The records of the Actor’s Equity Association confirm Hughes’s comments by revealing the importance of The Blacks in establishing and maintaining the presence of an African American acting corps on the New York stage. Retaining 14 stage actors and five understudies, The Blacks provided nearly an eighth of all New York black acting positions during its run, and over a third of all off-Broadway roles (Cruse, 1967, p. 526). What should be emphasized here is the nature of other available employment: while many productions included minor black roles, The Blacks offered a showcase for major characterizations. A symposium entitled The Negro Writer in America, convened in 1963 by Ossie Davis, and including prominent figures such as John O. Killens, Owen Dodson and James Baldwin, was one of the few instances in which The Blacks received early critical attention from contemporary black intellectuals. Of associated concern to this symposium was the role of the white audience to the black theatre movement. Dodson identified the play as ‘an absolute insult to the white audience [and] yet still the hordes keep coming to be insulted’ (Davis et al. 1963, p. 63). Davis explained Dodsen’s comments by suggesting that Whites come to the play to ‘be exposed to [black] hostility … in the safest possible fashion’ (ibid.). Noting the text’s suggestion that Blacks in power would be just as corrupt as the current white status quo, Killens thought that The Blacks let white people off the hook. Mimicking the voice of an imagined white spectator, Killens suggested that the following excuse would be proffered: ‘ “We shouldn’t feel so bad about the way we are treating them; they are going to do the same thing with us” ’ (ibid., p. 64). Davis responded to Killens’ intervention by drawing attention to the useful contribution that the ‘white liberal’ spectator


James Earl Jones suggests that his involvement in The Blacks marked an important moment in his early theatrical career. Like many of the cast, he relied on the show’s popularity and length of run to subsidize other professional pursuits. The play offered a type of home-base for actors, and Jones repeatedly left for different theatrical projects, only to return when other roles were no longer available (Jones and Niven, 1993, p. 123). Langston Hughes points out that


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still had to make:

Davis, an articulate critic as well as a writer, appreciated that The Blacks afforded white spectators a safe environment for encountering their own hostilities, but he also implied that the play’s distorted depictions of violent reprisal endangered productive alliances with the white community, and thus threatened to undermine its positive political potential. Nevertheless, despite the reservations of black intellectuals and artists, no one could deny that The Blacks marked an important turning point for African American theatre: it put black theatre firmly on the public map and provided a physical (if not aesthetic or mental) space where Blacks and Whites could meet. Nearly four years of profitable ticket sales were enough to suggest to New York producers that an audience could be cultivated for black theatre. The St Mark’s Playhouse, where Frankel’s production flourished, became a major locus for black theatre, eventually housing the influential Negro Ensemble Company (NEC). And it is highly probable that the success of The Blacks influenced the decision of Douglas Turner Ward, the co-founder of the company, to house the NEC at St Mark’s in 1967. The production seems to have invested the building with continuing opportunity for profit and exposure. There was, unfortunately, a drawback: the playhouse was not accessible to African American communities. The actor and director Woodie King, Jr noted that: ‘[These] theatres serve no purpose for the community around them. The same holds true for the Negro Ensemble Company, which is located in the 2nd Avenue Jewish community on New York’s Lower East Side. … It will be in Harlem that our best playwrights … will be appreciated’ (1968, pp. 120–1). If The Blacks played a major role in building the infrastructure of African American theatre, it also influenced contemporary black playwrights in unconventional ways. Langston Hughes was highly critical of adherents to Genet’s dramaturgical style:


I would say the white liberal is a burden, but he is not yet a drag. A great deal of what we have to do in this country as Blacks and as Whites can only be done if there is an alliance. … And that realistic evaluation, I think, has begun to take place, and it is causing a great deal of pain in the country. (ibid., p. 65)

[I]t behooves Negro writers in our segregated society, not necessarily to put our best foot forward, but to try at least to put a balanced foot



Paradoxically, Hughes’s comments, although negative, highlight just how important the impact of The Blacks was on a new generation of black playwrights in the 1960s. Structural resemblances and deliberate references to The Blacks are located, for instance, in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence, Amiri Baraka’s Great Goodness of Life, and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, which was produced posthumously in 1970.2 Moreover, if black playwrights of the 1960s did not adopt Genet’s dramaturgy out of sympathetic affinity, they were certainly compelled to contend with the play’s dynamic expression of racial hatred and formal experimentation. This impact extended to political spheres when, in March 1970, Genet toured universities in the United States to speak on behalf of the Black Panther Party. The Blacks ran for 1408 performances, becoming the longest standing serious drama in the history of New York theatre. Upon the play’s final performance on 27 September 1964, New York was processing the still recent Harlem riots. Two plays by the militant black playwright LeRoi Jones were running in Greenwich Village; Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was in rehearsal; and 20,000 New York parents had started to bus their white children to neighboring elementary schools previously attended exclusively by black and Puerto Rican students. Distant echoes of The Blacks can be discerned in Ossie Davis’ remarks concerning the future of black theatre in an article in The New York Times:


forward, so that we do not all appear to be living in a Cool World in Another Country in the Crazy House of the Negro in which the majority of The Blacks seem prone to little except the graffiti of The Toilet. … Pride, nobility, sacrifice and decency are qualities strangely lacking in some of the most talented outpourings by or about Negroes these days. … The last thing Negroes need now are black imitators of neurotic white writers who themselves have nothing of which to be proud. (1965, pp. 65, 75)

There is also a Theatre of Public Confessional, to which many of our more high-minded and socially conscious citizens come for the pleasure of being whipped in public. There are plays catering to our collective guilt as a society in matters of sex and race. … Let us, as artists, set before Man not only the magnitude of the tasks before him, but also the magnificence of the resources that lie deep within himself. (1964, p.1)


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Davis makes no mention of The Blacks in his hopeful vision for a new theatre movement. Still, this passage echoes the multiple and enflamed reactions provoked by the New York production of The Blacks, with Davis’ claim that certain audiences come to the theatre to expose collective shortcomings ‘in the safest possible fashion’. To that extent, then, it is possible to say that Genet’s play continues to haunt Davis’ thinking. Hence, his impassioned plea for an affirmative black theatre can certainly be read—as I would claim it is—as a dialectical attempt to deal with the sheer negativity provoked by the New York production of The Blacks. Genet’s The Blacks connected with debates that were central to the Civil Rights movement. This, ultimately, is where Genet’s influence is most keenly felt: the issues and controversies he so brilliantly ignited in The Blacks would help to define a generation of black thinkers and theatre makers in the United States.

Notes 1. In the ‘Préface inédite des Nègres’, Genet states categorically that his play ‘was not written for Blacks, but against Whites’ (2002, p. 843; editor’s translation, original italics). 2. While Kennedy and Baraka were certainly influenced by The Blacks, their plays are not as overtly referential as those of Turner Ward and Hansberry.

Works cited Angelou, M. The Heart of a Woman (New York: Random House, 1981). Clurman, H. ‘Theatre’, Nation, 20 May 1961, pp. 447–8. Cruse, H. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William and Morrow, 1967). Davis, O. ‘Plays of Insight are Needed to Make “Stage” Vital in Our Lives’, New York Times, 23 August 1964, Section 2, p. 1. Davis, O., J. Baldwin, O. Dodson and J.O. Killens. ‘The Negro Writer in America: A Symposium’, Negro Digest (June 1963), 54–65. Frechtman, B. ‘Genet’s Exercise in “Black Magic” ’, New York Herald Tribune, 30 September 1961, p. 3. Genet, J. ‘Préface inédite des Nègres’, in Jean Genet: Théâtre complet, eds, Michel Corvin and Albert Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 835–43. Hansberry, L. ‘Genet, Mailer, and “The New Paternalism” ’, Village Voice, 1 June 1961, pp. 10, 14–15. Hughes, L., J. Baldwin, O. Dodson and J. O. Killens. ‘The Task of the Negro Writer as Artist: A Symposium’, Negro Digest (April 1965), 55–83. Hughes, L. and M. Meltzer. Black Magic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967). Jones, J. E. and P. Niven. James Earl Jones: Voices and Silences (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993).


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King, Jr, W. ‘Black Theatre: Present Condition’, The Drama Review, 12: 4 (1968), 116–24. Little, S. Off-Broadway: The Prophetic Theatre (New York: Coward, McAnn & Geoghegan, 1972). Mailer, N. ‘Theatre: The Blacks’, Village Voice, 11 May 1961, pp. 11,14. Taubman, H. ‘Play From the French at St Mark’s, New York Times, 5 May 1961, p. 23. Williams, M. Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s (London: Greenwood Press, 1985).


Illustration 1 James Earl Jones with others in The Blacks at St Mark’s Playhouse, New York, 1961. Gene Frankel (dir.).


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11 Las criadas, Genet and Spain

The awkward performance style demanded by Jean Genet’s plays, based as David Bradby has observed, ‘on underlining and demonstrating the contradictions of the actor’s activity on stage’ (Bradby, 1984, p. 175), has always presented problems to actors caught between the demands of classicism’s grand rhetoric and naturalism’s supposed invisibility. Genet’s theatre requires the display of performativity or décalage as Genet referred to it. As Bradby states, actors must ‘find gestures that contradict the words’ (ibid., p. 176). Genet’s preferred performers often gave shape to these contradictions. I have written elsewhere of María Casares’ realization of the role of the Mother in Roger Blin’s 1966 production of The Screens—a characterization both pragmatic and superstitious, wily and stubborn (Delgado, 2003, pp. 107–10). Le Nouvel Observateur’s Guy Dumur was indicative of a number of French critics in viewing Casarès as the pivot of the production, the means to liberate all the other actors, unique among performers in ‘playing with her whole body, with her whole voice. She squats like an Arab woman, contorts like a gypsy woman, barks like a dog’ (1966, p. 38).1 Indeed, in offering a characterization that provided a bridge between classical tragedy and avant-garde performance, hers was a dishevelled and riotous performance style marked by raspish laughter, precise corporeal expression, haunting singing and uncanny animal noises. Vocally, it was as if her performance was musically scored; a unique portrayal which led Gilles Sandier to conclude that Casares provided an enigmatic presence which he had never seen in French actors (1966, p. 57). It is perhaps not surprising that, when Spanish actress Nuria Espert planned a production of The Maids three years later with the Argentine director Víctor García, she was to look at Casares in attempting to cast the role of Solange alongside her Claire. Casares refused to work in Spain


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while General Franco was still in power and the role was taken by Julieta Serrano, now best known to Anglo audiences through her role as the deranged mother in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Genet’s fascination with Spain has been well documented. He was a frequent visitor to Spain throughout his lifetime, having lived amongst prostitutes and beggars in Barcelona’s red-light district, the Barri Xinès, in 1933–34. Indeed, as Genet’s biographer Edmund White has astutely noted, ‘Genet closes The Thief’s Journal, his last novel, with the words, “the region of myself which I have called Spain” ’. In a sombre footnote, Genet remarks that, when Cocteau later called him his ‘Spanish genêt’, he ‘did not know what this country had done to me’ (White, 1993, p. 118). Gênet d’Espagne, as his close friend the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo refers to him, ‘rests in the old Spanish cemetery in Larache. … His strategies for getting loots could have filled an anthology of tricks and wiles, worthy of a hero of the Spanish picaresque novel’ (1990, p. 130). With Spanish named characters and references to Franco’s mausoleum in The Balcony, the Catalan director Lluís Pasqual, who was to stage the play in both Catalan in 1981 and in French ten years later, views Genet’s fascination with Spain as a bridge between the western and Arabic worlds.2 Indeed, in preparing her role as the Mother in The Screens, Genet was to advise Casares to look inside her ‘Hispanic heritage’ (Zatlin 1994, p. 128).3 Perhaps, as Phyllis Zatlin has observed, Genet was able to touch a ‘particularly responsive chord in Spain’ because his ‘iconoclastic unmasking of decadence from the vantage point of the Other spoke directly to another essential, if contradictory, aspect of both Spanish tradition and of contemporary Hispanic reality’ (ibid., p. 127). While Genet’s impact on dramatists like Francisco Nieva, Fernando Arrabal and Luis Riaza has been traced elsewhere by Zatlin, the extraordinary impact of Víctor García’s 1969 production of The Maids (presented as Las criadas), acknowledged by Genet on numerous occasions as his favourite staging of the play, forms the focus of this essay (Monleón, 1969, pp. 18–19). The production transcended the register of controlled naturalism in presenting a performance language for Genet which, refracted through the prisms of translation, articulated the ‘otherness’ of the play through what Bradby has appropriately termed ‘a specifically theatrical means of expression’ (see Chapter 2, this volume). While Espert and García’s Las criadas was to have a significant impact across the European festival circuit in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she was a largely unknown figure outside Spain until she joined forces with García. Espert had set up her own company with her husband Armando


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Moreno in 1959, working largely within the private sector on both classical texts with particular resonance within the enclosed climate of Francoism (for example, Hamlet, 1960), and on contemporary writing by dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill and Jean-Paul Sartre, which tested the limits of the country’s draconian censorship regulations. By the late 1960s, Espert was arguably the most distinctive Spanish actress of her generation. Her distinguishing physical features—almondshaped eyes, often adorned with the darkest of kohl, and a pale angular face contrasting with her jet black hair, suggesting an intellectual femininity—gave her something of Maria Callas’ dramatic intensity. Able to bring together the naturalistic performance discourse that gained ground in the 1950s and 1960s theatre with more epic acting techniques, she appeared to exert a detached observatory quality over her acting, marked by an emphatic, mournful register suited to the demands of the grand tragic roles. Sensing that her own company ‘had reached the ceiling of what could be done in Spanish theatre at the time’, the need to ‘expand further’ involved contracting someone from ‘outside Spain’, although Espert and Moreno felt that the company’s own history, irrevocably ‘bound up with the contemporary history of Spain’, obliged them to remain in Spain with ‘Spain imprinted’ on all future work (Espert, quoted in Londré, 1985). The decision to turn to García was motivated by a series of factors. Espert was already aware of García’s adventurous work on the Parisian stage as early as 1967, admiring the ‘aggressive lack of restraint he displayed’ (ibid.). There was a shared linguistic heritage, and also the advantage of a practitioner whose performative paradigms had been formed outside of the repressive climate of Francoist Spain. García, had studied medicine and architecture in Argentina before coming to Paris at the age of 29, enrolling alongside Argentine Jorge Lavelli at l’Université des Théâtre des Nations in the early 1960s. In Paris, like Lavelli, García was to fashion alternative directions in French theatre during the mid1960s, pursuing a vision of theatre as a baroque space of arresting images where the sensory and the visceral displaced the rational in a ritualistic ceremonial pageant. As early as 1964, staging Automobile Graveyard at a hanger in Dijon, García’s conception of space as an environmental, architectural arena demonstrated an imagistic performance idiom where the text was subsumed and re-envisaged within a spectacle of haunting excess. García’s interest in psychiatry, his medical specialization, was to prove a strong influence on his work with actors and may, in part, explain his attraction to dramatic works that interrogate the construction of the psyche. His architectural training was also to shape his


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conception of scenic space, played out, as David Whitton has observed, ‘not merely in a command of line but the much rarer ability to conceptualize complex constructions and movements in three dimensions’ (1987, p. 164). Espert’s collaboration with García was originally conceived as a double bill, with Las criadas presented in Spanish along with Fernando Arrabal’s one-act play The Two Executioners on 7 February 1969. Arrabal’s play was, however, banned by the censors, following the final dress rehearsal.4 The censors, nevertheless, leaving Madrid’s Reina Victoria Theatre before Las criadas had begun, failed to prohibit Genet’s play, but Francisco Muñoz Lusarreta, then director of the theatre, dismissed the company, who were obliged to find an alternative venue at desperately short notice. They transferred to Barcelona’s Poliorama Theatre, aiming to open on 21 February, as the theatre had been freed up by the closure of Adolfo Marsillach’s staging of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade.5 Initially, Las criadas was accompanied by Yiddish songs translated into Catalan, Espert here ‘attempting to free herself from a confining net’ (Londré, 1985), but these were gradually dropped as it became clear that the audiences needed no ‘supporting’ programme. García’s concept of an enclosed performance space made up of a raked plane surrounded by 14 matt and shiny aluminium sheets, made it difficult for an audience to locate mimetic referents. Genet’s stage directions situate the play within Madame’s bedroom, an opulent space filled with Louis XV furniture, abundant flowers, and an upstage window that looks out onto the façade of the building opposite. García, collaborating on the design with Enrique Alarcón, provided a circular, non-decorative, chapel-like space. The high-mirrored pivoting panels allowed for a constant interplay between the real and its imaginary, underlining a fascination with the reflection of social and political hierarchies which is present in all Genet’s work. For, as Bradby has noted, Genet’s plays operate primarily at the level of metaphor: ‘the figures of … the maids … do not represent the reality of power or slavery, but its image … they become figures onto which the audience projects its own image of social roles and power relations’ (1984, p.174). García’s production eschewed naturalistic detail in favour of emphatic stylization. These maids first appeared as plaintive cries from the darkness. Espert’s Claire emerged from a pool of light in the centre of the space, rising up like a peacock with a grand ceremonial head-dress to begin her impersonation of Madame, here referred to as La Señora. This was theatre as ceremony, with the cathedral-like stage functioning as a conscious mirror where images of the Self were constantly viewed through images of the Other.


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The sharply raked stage was marked by a central circular, hollowed enclosure covered with a black cloth evocative of a bedspread. This functioned as altar, bed and tomb: a throne where La Señora lies pontificating on her goodness to the maids, and Claire’s sacrificial place of slaughter where she falls dead having drunk from the poisoned chalice that contains the laced camomile tea. Espert has spoken of how the space initially terrified the performers but they learnt to appropriate it (Monleón, 1982, p. 45). This involved dispensing with psychological reasoning as the motivating impetus of behaviour, opting to explore the relationship between dominator and dominated, love and hate, as a means of positioning the two maids within the parameters of sanctity and criminality around which much of Genet’s work revolves. As such, Espert’s Claire and Serrano’s Solange appeared almost as facets of the same being rather than individual entities, enacting a series of rituals endlessly reflected in the wall of mirrors which never allowed the audience to forget that the characters were, above all, their social roles: life as performance. I have commented on the particular acting style that Genet’s plays necessitate, with all interaction ceasing to be natural and becoming conscious imitation or performance with an emphasis on gestures that do not necessarily complement or suit the word. García’s rehearsal work with Espert, Serrano and Mayreta O’Wisiedo (La Señora) sought to construct an anti-realistic acting aesthetic where appearance was both form and subject, and where ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ remained elusive concepts that defied revelation. All three characters were exposed as actors enacting roles within a circular holy arena where imprisonment and surveillance were the order of the day. While the giant metallic panels slid open vertically, each exit was marked by a barrage of noise, reinforcing the culture of surveillance. When Claire sought to open the windows, she found only hard panels that she knocked into and which hurled her back into the constrained space. Light streaming through the cracks in the panels in tiny narrow paths reminded the audience and performers of a world outside. For The Balcony, Genet had set particular demands for actors contracted to perform the play, envisaging them wearing shoes with 20 inch soles that would demand that the actors perfect a new sense of balance to avoid toppling over (Aslan, 1988, p. 87). García was to appropriate this ideal, as Espert’s Claire clambered up from the floor in high platform shoes in her first impersonation of La Señora. These shoes were also worn by La Señora, who similarly tottered across the stage, looking down both figuratively and literally on her maids. Solange and Claire




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were dressed in simple black tunic dresses and black stockings, their straight black hair further emphasizing the mirror motif. While the maids occupied the horizontal plane, crawling across the floor like beasts preparing for the kill, La Señora was associated with the vertical, flying down through an opened vertical panel like an exaggeratedly regal image in pale, flowing, translucent fabric, whose elevated feet never come close to touching the ground. The roles were emphasized both visually and verbally as Solange spoke to La Señora in a marked declamatory tone, as if reciting particular learned responses, while Claire adopted a more overt whining tone. All were enveloped in the trappings of performance, appearing to say one thing while their tone exposed their devotion as jealous contempt. As outside factors intruded—the alarm clock warning of La Señora’s imminent return— anger and frustration enveloped the sisters and they tore at each other like wild panthers. Solange’s bitter thumps against the echoing panels and Claire’s self-flagellation served to delineate the unholy ritual enacted before the audience. The robes in which Claire was clad by Solange in the opening scene of the play and the spectral white cassock and nun-like headpiece in which Claire made her final appearance as La Señora, as well as the goblets which replaced the china of Genet’s text, all sought to underline the ritualistic, mass-like associations of the production, which reinforced Genet’s own views around the high theatrics of the Catholic mass.6 Whatever the Catalan critics’ reservations about a staging that was denounced as cold, dehumanized and more audacious than imaginative (Martínez Tomás, 1969), Espert, Serrano and O’Wisiedo were commended for rendering remarkable performances of rigorous discipline on the awkwardly steep rake of the stage (Benach, 1969).7 Espert has acknowledged how the dialogue of Genet’s play was the last element to be incorporated into the rehearsal process, fixed only days before the opening (quoted in Primer Acto, 1969, p. 20). And indeed, the rehearsal process set up an approach to the play that physicalized the linguistic encounters. It was around the very eschewing of the play’s literary allusions and connotations that the production’s aesthetic pivoted, rendering the audience silent, participating witnesses to the slaughter enacted before them. As Claire drinks from the poisoned chalice in the final instances of the play, the use of the highly formalist Sarabande from Bach’s Cello Suite 2 in D Minor interpreted by Pau Casals, the Catalan cellist still living in exile, further served to underline the baroque rigidity and ritualistic form of the world in which the maids are trapped. The radical musician, who was not to return to Spain until his remains were interred in his


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hometown of El Vendrell in 1979, was perceived as one of Franco’s most vociferous critics. The use of his recording of Bach’s Suite, advertized on the poster and publicity for the production, further emphasized the anti-authoritarian associations of a production that was to serve as the defining introduction of Genet’s corrosive work to Spain. With this production, which García came to acknowledge as his finest piece of work (García, quoted in Pérez Coterillo, 1984, p. 10), Espert consolidated her company’s reputation as both an exponent of alternative modes of performance and advocator of a repertoire that moved marginal playwrights to the very centre of theatrical debate and culture in Spain. The production finally premiered at the Madrid’s Fígaro theatre on 9 October 1969, where it clocked up 190 performances in its now legendary five-month run (Cornago Bernal, 1999, p. 97). Madrid’s critics, too, were, barring a few predictable exceptions, fulsome in their praise for a production that broadened the parameters of theatrical representation within Spain’s censorious cultural climate, opening up new possibilities for a less literal stage culture (Monleón, 1970, pp. 10–11).8 Abroad, too, the production’s delirious critical response indicated that Spanish theatre provided ‘exportable’ products within the selective arts festival circuit. Invited by Mira Trailovic to the Belgrade Theatre Festival, the staging won a number of significant prizes. Espert has subsequently recognized the importance of the Belgrade Festival in opening international interest in Las criadas and in ensuring a more receptive climate for the production on its return to Spain for the Madrid run (Monleón, 1983, p. viii).9 The staging was then seen in 1970 at Théâtre de la Cité Universitaire in Paris, where it was much admired by Genet (Olivier, 1970, p. 52). A French staging was planned with a different cast, but when produced at the Espace Pierre Cardin in 1971, never generated the same critical accolades as the original production (Aslan, 1975, pp. 173–200; Bablet, 1975, pp. 305–10; Whitton, 1987, pp. 177–8). The way the Espert/García production refracted Genet’s language through the otherness of translation, seeking physical analogies for the verbal assaults of the play, struck a particular resonance in 1970s Europe. The context for the production, Franco’s Spain, and the resonances of Espert’s company as dispossessed within a political establishment that had effectively disassociated itself from the staging, added a certain provocative edge. This was recognized by Genet, who had judged the work as dated and stale until García’s staging effectively canonized the play in the way Chéreau was to do with Bernard-Marie Koltès’ work. While Espert and García were to go on to stage Federico García Lorca’s Yerma on an undulating olive grey canvas trampoline in 1971 which




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moved away from the habitual Andalusian referents of past productions, and to stage Valle-Inclán’s Divine Words in 1976 on a mobile set consisting of portable trucks filled with organ pipes of different lengths and jutting trumpets (Millas, 1982; Espert and Ordóñez, 2002, p. 110), it was Las criadas that Espert was to position as their most resonant collaboration. Revived in 1983 following Garcia’s death, it opened at the Principal Theatre in Valencia with Espert and Serrano reprising their roles.10 The major change involved a new Castilian adaptation by Armando Moreno, and it was now discernibly recognized as a classic by Spanish critics who benefited from the hindsight of 14 years of theatrical innovations. A two-year international tour in Argentina, Italy and Switzerland, as well as an extensive Spanish tour (which had been prohibited in 1969) introduced the play to a new generation of spectators and, while the production may not have had the monumental force of its first outing in the repressed socio-political climate of the late Franco years, it reinforced a performative idiom for Genet’s work that tore apart ideological and theatrical constructs and announced a postmodern subject that has no core or ‘truth’, engendered solely of the superimposed ideological masks of performance. Goytisolo writes of Genet’s ‘paradoxically monogamous relationship with French; Genet was completely resistant to other languages: he understood only Italian and the coarsest Spanish’ (1990, p. 126), and yet, as García’s production indicates, Spain formed a crucial part in shaping the performative register for Genet’s work. El País’ Marcos Ordóñez argues that Las criadas effectively altered Genet’s view of the play (2002), while Jeanette Savona cites Genet’s observation that the ‘production had “gone further” than his own text’ (1983, p. 43). While we cannot be entirely clear as to what ‘gone further’ refers to, it may be an indication as to the ways in which García favoured a playful symbiosis that never ventures into the terrain of studied naturalism. While the production may provide an authorially endorsed register for the play, it has not prevented others in Spain from tackling what has arguably become Genet’s most emblematic work. Mario Gas’ 2002 production of Las criadas with Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and Emma Suárez, known primarily for their work in film, simultaneously recognized the shadow cast by García’s staging, and offered a more conspiratorial take on the play. Gas’ and Antonio Belart’s set of mirrored panelling, as well as Belart’s evocative costume design, provided a visual nod to García, but the production was a move away from the Argentine director’s ‘savage oratorio’ in its pursuit of a ‘ceremonial thriller’ that evoked the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, as well as providing


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references to Rainer Fassbinder and Claude Chabrol that picked up on the associations of casting two performers with prominent track records in cinema (Ordóñez, 2002). While Las criadas was playing at Madrid’s Albéniz Theatre in mid-March 2002, two other Madrid theatres offered stagings of the play: Liberarte Teatro Studio presented an all-male version directed by Daniel Cicaré, who also took the role of Madame, and Arlequín Theatre, another fringe venue, hosted Franco-Argentine director Gabriel Chamé Buendia’s physical adaptation.11 Perhaps the rhetorical vein of Castilian-Spanish is better suited as a language into which to translate Genet’s mannered language. Perhaps Catholic ceremonials have provided a potent idiom that bypasses the pantomime and camp through which Genet is too often read in the Anglo-Saxon world. Perhaps García’s production, negotiating the political while avoiding the literal, simply provided a prototype that allowed the play to negotiate a space beyond either the humanist emphasis on the degradation of social oppression or the academic sado-masochistic essay on pathological obsession.

Notes 1. All translations are mine unless indicated in Works cited. 2. In an unpublished interview with the author, July 2000. 3. Significantly, American director Peter Sellars’ 1998 staging of The Screens/Los biombos in an adaptation by Gloria Alvarez and Cornerstone Theater, resituated the action in East Los Angeles’ Latino community. 4. Espert’s memoirs mention that it was Arrabal who first suggested García as a possible director for the double bill, when she and Moreno visited Paris to discuss a possible staging of Los dos verdugos. See Espert and Ordóñez (2002, p. 99). 5. The events around the opening of the production are narrated by Espert (Espert, quoted in Monleón, 1982, pp. 44–5) and Espert and Ordóñez (2002, pp. 99–109). 6. These associations have been explored in greater detail by Whitton (1987, pp. 174–80) and Cornago Bernal (1999, pp. 91–8). 7. Only María Luz Morales of the Diario de Barcelona commends the production, describing how it conveys Genet’s ceremonial study of domestic oppression and social discontent, by scenic means (1969). 8. For comments on the production, see Álvaro (1970, pp. 227–30). 9. Indeed, in her memoirs, Espert articulates the view that it was press reports of the company’s impending visit to the Belgrade Theatre Festival, which led to an invitation to bring the staging to the Fígaro which was then functioning as a cinema. See Espert and Ordóñez (2002, p. 112). 10. Marisa Paredes was initially cast as La Señora and took the role in the play’s Valencian run at the Principal Theatre in January 1983. She was later replaced by O’Wisiedo.




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11. Another production of Las criadas opened in Alicante’s Arniches Theatre in a production by La Ruta on 19 January 2001. While The Maids seems to be the most resonant of Genet’s works in Spain, other plays have enjoyed attention, notably Elle in Cesarío Estéban’s production for El Zacatín, presented at Seville’s San Luis de los Franceses Church in November 2001.

Álvaro, F. El espectador y la crítica (El teatro en España en 1969) (Valladolid: Edición del autor, 1970). Aslan, O. ‘L’interprétation des Bonnes’ in Les Voies de la création théâtrale, 4, eds, D. Bablet and J. Jacquot (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), pp. 173–200. —— Roger Blin, trans. R. Cohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Bablet, D. ‘Tentative et conclusion’ in Les Voies de la création théâtrale, 4, eds, D. Bablet and J. Jacquot (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975), pp. 305–10. Benach, J-A. ‘Las criadas: entre el servilismo y la rebeldia’, El Correo Catalán, 23 February 1969, p. 26. Bradby, D. Modern French Drama: 1940–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Cornago Bernal, Ó. La vanguardia teatral en España (1965–1975): Del ritual al juego (Madrid: Visor, 1999). Delgado, M.M. ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the TwentiethCentury Spanish Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Dumur, G. ‘Le pire est toujours sûr’, Nouvel Observateur, 27 April 1966, p. 38. Espert, N. and M. Ordóñez. De aire y fuego: Memorias (Madrid: Aguilar, 2002). Goytisolo, Juan. Realms of Strife: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo 1957–1982, trans. P. Bush (London and New York: Quartet Books, 1990). Londré, F. H. ‘Bringing Arrabal Home: The Theatre of Nuria Espert’, Unpublished paper delivered at the American Theatre Association Convention Toronto, 4–7 August 1985. Martínez Tomás, A. ‘Poliorama, Las criadas (Les Bonnes) de Jean Genet’, La Vanguardia Española, 22 February 1969, p. 44. Millas, J. ‘Nuria Espert, entre Lorca, Genet y Shakespeare’, El País, 31 December 1982, ‘Artes’ supplement, p. 7. Monleón, J. ‘En Madrid con Jean Genet. 10 años de silencio’, Primer Acto, 115 (December 1969), 12–19. —— ‘Del Marat-Sade a Las criadas’, Primer Acto, 116 (January 1970), 10–13. —— ‘Teatro Principal de Valencia’, Primer Acto, 196 (November–December 1982), 44–5. —— ‘Las criadas: testimonio de una reconstruccion’, Diario, 16 (23 January 1983), pp. viii–ix. Morales, M.L. ‘Teatro Poliorama: La Compañia de Nuria Espert presenta Las criadas de Jean Genet, en traducción de Manuel Herrero’, Diario de Barcelona, 22 February 1969, p. 25. Olivier, J.J. ‘Paris’, Plays and Players, 17: 11 (August 1970), 52–3. Ordóñez, M. ‘Ceremonia secreta’, El País, 9 February 2002, Babelia section, p. 20.


Works cited


Pérez Coterillo, M. ‘Núria Espert: Víctor García mereció la palabra genio’, El Público, 14 (14 November 1984), pp. 9–11. Primer Acto. ‘Las criadas por sus tres ínterpretes’, Primer Acto, 115 (December 1969), 20–7. Sandier, G. ‘Genet, un exorciste de génie’, Arts (3 May 1966), p. 57. Savona, J. Jean Genet (London: Macmillan, 1983). White, E. Genet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993). Whitton, D. Stage Directors in Modern France. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). Zatlin, P. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Theatre: The Spanish–French Connection (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1994).




Illustration 2 Nuria Espert and Julieta Serrano as Claire and Solange in Las criadas at the Poliorama Theatre, Barcelona, 1969. Víctor García (dir.).


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Illustration 3 Nuria Espert and Julieta Serrano as Claire and Solange in Las criadas at the Poliorama Theatre, Barcelona, 1969. Víctor García (dir.).





Part V


Genet: Cinema and Dance





12 Elizabeth Stephens

You Higher Men, the worst about you is: none of you has learned to dance as a man ought to dance—to dance beyond yourselves! … How much still is possible! … Lift up your hearts, you fine dancers, high, higher! (Nietzsche, 1961, p. 306) Like the 12 fairy tale princesses who escape from their locked bedrooms each night and wear out their shoes by dancing, for Genet’s imprisoned characters dance provides a form of release and an expression of forbidden desire.1 The young Louis Culafroy in Our Lady of the Flowers, stifled by his provincial village, daydreams of Nijinsky and yearns to ‘transform … his life into a perpetual ballet’ (Genet, 1964a, p. 130). Inventing his own private choreography of leaps and pirouettes, Culafroy senses the possibility that his dance will propel him far above the mundane world of the village, that it ‘might have made him take off, leave the earth, might have launched him into worlds from which he would never return’ (ibid., p. 129). This flight out of conventional village life is later realized through Culafroy’s transformation into the transvestite prostitute Divine, whose life becomes a continuous performance of theatrical roles and gestures. She plays at being a movie star (ibid., p. 83) and develops an elaborate repertoire of ritualized gestures (ibid., p. 93). Her story ‘should be danced, mimed … ma[d]e a ballet’, Genet reflects (ibid., p. 61). In this respect, Our Lady of the Flowers, Genet’s first novel, foreshadows the importance that dance will continue to have in his work as a whole, and especially to his representation of homoeroticism in film. In many of Genet’s subsequent texts, dance continues to function as a process of self-transformation, recalling the celebration of dance found in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which it represents


Corporeographies: The Dancing Body in ’adame Miroir and Un chant d’amour

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Elizabeth Stephens

a kind of mental agility, a levity that allows one to literally rise above the limitations and assumptions of the surrounding culture. For Nietzsche, lightness of foot provides the means to overcome or get beyond oneself, escaping the narrow confines of stable subjectivity. Genet’s representations of dance reveal a similar understanding of its potential to produce different kinds of subjectivity and experience, in ways that are central to the sexual politics and poetics of his work. In this essay, I will examine how the dancing body represented in two of Genet’s silent works—the ballet ’adame Miroir and the film Un chant d’amour (France, 1950, 25 mins)—constitutes a ‘corporeography,’ a bodily writing through which homoerotic desire is expressed.2 The importance of dance to the narrative structure of Genet’s work, and especially to its homoeroticism, is nowhere more evident than in the ballet scenario ’adame Miroir, Genet’s only dance text. Written in 1948, at a time when Genet was simultaneously producing poetry, prose and play scripts, the scenario of ’adame Miroir translates into dance form many of the central narrative elements of his work, including those of pursuit, capture, imprisonment, execution and transformation. First performed at the Théâtre Marigny by Ballets de Paris de de Roland Petit in May 1948, with choreography by Janine Charrat, the scenario only became widely available with its posthumous publication by Gallimard in 1990 in Fragments … et autres textes (the text was translated into English in Fragments of the Artwork in 2003).3 Despite its marginal position within Genet’s œuvre, however, ’adame miroir remains an important text, crystallizing many of the central images and concerns of Genet’s homoerotic writing. The scenario is set within a palace ‘covered with beveled mirrors’ (Genet, 2003, p. 1), and its choreography begins with a muscular Sailor dancing alone before a mirror in which the movements of his reflection do not consistently correspond to his original gestures. Approaching and retreating from one another, the Reflection leaps through the looking glass and begins to pursue the Sailor. Gradually, warily, the two dancers ‘touch, turn, and embrace. Kiss each other on the mouth’ (ibid., p. 3). As their dance becomes faster and more erotic, they are approached by the Domino, a figure in a hooded black cape. The Domino, Sailor and Reflection then dance a wild, frenzied dance together, before the Domino captures the Sailor and knifes him with the handle of his fan. He drags the Sailor’s body into the wings. When he returns, he begins ‘an extremely violent dance’ with the Reflection (ibid., p. 5). He does not kill him, however. Instead, the Domino begins to disrobe, removing his gloves and unravelling his long black cape, in which he


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dresses the Reflection. As he does so, we see that under his hood the Domino is (dressed as) the original Sailor. Once the Reflection is clothed as the Domino, he begins to pursue the former Domino, who is now dressed as the Sailor, until first the ‘Sailor,’ and then the ‘Domino,’ eventually find their way back through the looking glass, leaving the stage empty. In its first production, as recorded in this scenario, the staging and performance of ’adame Miroir reveals a clear debt to the Parisian ballet tradition, and in particular to the Surrealist ballets developed by Cocteau with Diaghilev and Nijinsky.4 Many of those involved in the production of ’adame Miroir had previously worked directly with Cocteau. Roland Petit, who danced the role of the Sailor, had just left the Ballet des Champs-Elysées, where he had recently performed in Cocteau’s Le jeune homme et la mort in 1946, a scenario which shares a number of narrative similarities with ’adame Miroir (White, 1993, p. 222). Janine Charrat, the choreographer, had also worked with the Ballet des Champs-Elysées. Léonor Fini, the costume designer, and Paul Delvaux, the set designer, were both associated with the Surrealists. Whilst the first staging of ’adame Miroir was therefore clearly informed by the cultural context in which it was produced, the text of the ballet is nonetheless recognizably Genetian in its style and preoccupations. This is especially evident in the setting of the scenario within a hall of mirrors, those ‘loathsome mirrors you find in amusement parks’ (Genet, 1965, p.192) that feature so prominently in Genet’s work. Mirrors, and particularly halls of mirrors, play a pivotal role in many of Genet’s narratives. Richard Coe argues that the mirror is ‘the most obsessive symbol in Genet’s thought … the symbol of the whole of Genet’s world—a world in which there is no certain or tangible reality, but only appearances and voids’ (1968, p. 7). Many of Genet’s narratives are set within labyrinths of mirrors, in which the distinction between real and reflection, original and copy, is progressively undermined. In The Balcony, for instance, the clients of the brothel in which the play is set pay to dress up and enact the roles of various dignitaries within a series of mirrored rooms, secretly watched by the madam, Irma, through her own system of hidden mirrors. When a ‘revolution’ overthrows the real figures of government, the Police Chief replaces them with their brothel simulacra.5 Thus, while in ’adame Miroir the ‘real’ Sailor is pursued by his Reflection, in The Balcony the imitators are superseded by their realities. In this way, mirrors do not simply represent the border at which the ‘imaginary’ might cross over into the ‘real’ in Genet’s work, but are rather the medium of exchange that allows movement in both directions.


The Dancing Body in ’adame Miroir and Un chant d’amour 161


Elizabeth Stephens

How this representational economy informs the narrative of ’adame Miroir is further elucidated by the note at the end of the scenario, in which Genet recounts the origin of the idea for the ballet. This ‘came to me’, he writes ‘at the Montmartre fair, in front of a sort of Palace of Mirrors in which the onlookers seemed imprisoned, bumped into their own image, and seemed incapable of finding the exit. I remembered a similar scene of which I had been the troubled witness, in Anvers, long ago’ (2003, p. 7). ’adame Miroir is here positioned as part of an intertextual chain of halls of mirrors that extends throughout Genet’s work. The scene in Anvers to which Genet refers is described in The Thief’s Journal, in which Genet discovers Stilitano trapped inside a hall of mirrors at a local funfair: Stilitano, and he alone, was trapped, visibly at a loss, in the glass corridors. No one could hear him, but by his gestures and his mouth one could tell he was screaming with anger. Furiously he was looking at the crowd, who were looking at him and laughing. … Everyone had found the way out, except him. … [E]xhausted with yelling and bumping into the plate glass, resigned to being the laughing-stock of the onlookers, Stilitano simply squatted on the floor, indicating thereby that he refused to go on. (Genet, 1964b, p. 265; original italics) Both the Anvers and the Montmartre halls of mirrors share an important characteristic: both imprison the fairgoers that enter into them, who become trapped by their own distorted and multiplied reflections. Halls of mirrors are not fairground amusements for Genet, but dangerous, hallucinatory places in which men are confronted by their inability to control their reflections. Stilitano, like the Sailor in ’adame Miroir, has become a prisoner of his own image. The independence of the Reflection’s movements in ’adame Miroir epitomizes a problematization of real and fake, original and imitation, found throughout Genet’s work. For Genet, mirrors never reflect passive images of oneself, but instead reveal the extent to which characters are composed of appearances and illusions they never fully master. As Genet reflects in Miracle of the Rose, ‘the system of mirrors … reflect back to you an image of yourself you did not compose’ (1965, p. 141). What Genet’s characters see in mirrors is not the stable reflection of their own essential identity, but rather a chain of images of which they themselves are the reflections. When Mignon in Our Lady of the Flowers catches sight


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of himself in the mirror of a shop window,

In ’adame Miroir, similarly, the identities of Sailor, Reflection and the Domino are not represented as the essential character of particular performers, but as a chain of possible identities that passes between them. This can be seen when the characters exchange costumes, at which point their roles are also completely reversed: once the Reflection is dressed as the Domino, he is the Domino; just as the Domino, dressed as the Sailor, is the Sailor. As in all Genet’s work, costume is identity. Dance here thus precipitates a lightness and exchange of identities in a way that recalls Nietzsche’s comments in the epigraph to this essay. Through the choreography of their interactions, each character goes beyond its current identity, becoming another. In one respect, such representations of identity as a result of particular clothes, gestures and mannerisms have clear parallels with Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender. Just as Genet’s narratives represent identity as the product of its own performance, so Butler has famously argued that gender is not a stable or essential part of one’s self, but rather an effect of the acts and attributes that the self is generally understood to express. This argument is, she recognizes, indebted to Nietzsche’s critique of the subject: The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything’. In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results. (Butler, 1990, p. 25)


he saw a Darling … wearing a Prince of Wales suit, a felt hat over one eye, his shoulders stiff, and when he walks he holds them like that so as to resemble Sebastopol Pete, and Pete holds them like that so as to resemble Pauley the Rat, and Pauley to resemble Teewee, and so on; a procession of pure, irreproachable pimps. (Genet, 1964a, p. 70; translation modified)

Likewise, Genet’s work represents identity as a contingent assemblage of conventions and gestures, a repertoire of roles. In Miracle of the Rose, for


Elizabeth Stephens

instance, Genet’s narrator turns himself into a dur (a hard man), not by physically fighting, but by adopting the appropriate manner: ‘I strode jauntily in my strength, with a weightiness, a sureness, a forthright look which are themselves proof of force’ (1965, p. 25; original italics). At the same time, however, it is important to recognize substantive differences between Butler’s and Genet’s understandings of gender as performance. In the first place, the fact that their works concentrate on different genders has a number of important consequences. While there is a long history of writing on the dangerous craft(iness) and wily artifice of the female body—that is, while femininity has traditionally been seen as performative—masculinity has remained a much more naturalized and self-effaced, category. As a result, Genet’s representation of performative masculinities is far more challenging to traditional notions of gender than Butler’s denaturalizing normative cultural assumptions about masculinity. Furthermore, Genet’s work focuses more intently on the role of corporeal specificity in gender performance. In Butler’s famous example of drag as gender parody, for instance, the male body exists as a general category rather than a material specificity—that is, Butler does not consider how the performance of drag is inflected differently by different kinds of body. There are simply ‘male bodies’ that do drag. Genet’s representation of drag, on the other hand, examines in detail the extent to which some bodies are inherently more convincing within certain roles than others, because of the particularities of their corporealities. Unlike Butler’s more generalized examples, Genet’s drag queens are more often to be found wandering the streets at dawn, drunk and stubbly, wigs askew. Their bodies—the material specificity of their bodies—intrude into and inform their gender performance. For Genet, such performances are not simply a matter of subjective intent, but are also shaped by the materiality of the body and its capabilities. The corporeal specificity of the body is not only an important part of the meaning of Genet’s narratives, but essential to their homoeroticism: the identities that pass between men in ’adame Miroir link them together in what Mairéad Hanrahan has called a ‘chain of desire’ (1997, p. 93). The series of becomings that underpins ’adame Miroir’s scenario draws attention to the homoerotic implications of such exchanges, in which attraction and desire cause bodies to merge and become one another. How this comprises a ‘corporeography,’ a bodily writing enacted through the movement of dance, is further demonstrated by Genet’s film Un chant d’amour. Like ’adame Miroir, Un chant d’amour comprises a unique part of Genet’s œuvre, as the only film he directed.6 A silent movie, Un chant d’amour provides another parallel with ’adame Miroir in


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that both texts represent expressions of homoerotic desire without dialogue. Moreover, as with his ballet, Genet’s film text provides a condensed version of the iconography and homoerotic imagery found in his work as a whole, translating these into a visual language. The narrative of Un chant d’amour consists of a series of tableaux concerning prisoners in adjoining solitary jail cells, separated by thick stone walls and secretly observed by the warden. Much of the film concentrates on the relationship between two of the prisoners. The first, a younger man, restlessly paces his cell and then begins a slow, circular dance. In the neighbouring cell, an older prisoner threads a piece of straw through a narrow gap in the stone wall between the cells and lights a cigarette, blowing the smoke into his neighbour’s cell. The younger prisoner watches as the smoke billows into the room, and then, sneering, resumes his dance. This time he moves in a more frenzied fashion, fondling the tattoo of a woman on his arm as he does so. With an anguished expression, the older man retracts the straw and fills the hole in the wall with chewinggum. He pounds the wall with his fists in frustration. As in ’adame Miroir, the eroticization of the prisoner’s dance is reflected in the increased frenzy of its execution. The function of dance in Un chant d’amour echoes this: just as the dance in the ballet transformed a solid mirror into an open doorway, allowing the Sailor and Reflection to dance together, so the dance in the film serves to breach the apparently impenetrable barrier of the stone wall between the prisoners in a way that enables erotic encounters between them. For, after finishing his dance, the younger prisoner selects a piece of straw from his own mattress, and threads it through a tiny crack in the thick stone wall. The older prisoner blows another cloud of smoke into the adjoining cell, which emerges from a large graffiti image of a penis. The younger prisoner then falls to his knees, and swallows the billowing smoke from the straw that protrudes through the wall. The breaching of the physically bounded and secure space of the solitary prison cell forms a potent homoerotic image in Genet’s work, a metaphor for the heterosexual male body opened to homoerotic pleasures. In Un chant d’amour, it is the younger prisoner’s dance which produces this shift: his embrace of the tattooed woman on his arm suggests that this character identifies himself as heterosexual, but it is also through the erotic movement of his dance that he is encouraged to respond to his neighbouring prisoner’s advances. If dance provides such an important—and highly privileged—language in and through which to articulate homoerotic desire in Genet’s work, this is in part because his characters are so often silenced and marginalized




Elizabeth Stephens

figures, because they have so few alternatives in/through which to communicate with one another. Many of Genet’s characters are prisoners locked in solitary confinement, with limited opportunities to speak to one another. The silence of Un chant d’amour both dramatizes and intensifies the solitude imposed on the prisoners by the penitentiary system. In Miracle of the Rose, the dances of the prisoners are described as a form of bodily writing that makes the jail resonate with unspoken desires, and which transforms their silence and isolation into an expression of homoerotic sexual tension: ‘the convicts modelled the air with their contortions, gestures, calls, their cries and modulations, their sea-cow vociferation, the silent movements of their mouths; they torture the air and sculpt the pain’ (1965, p. 62). Prevented from speaking to one another, the prisoners use their bodies as vehicles for communication. In ’adame Miroir, another silent text, this bodily writing leads to the merging and exchange of identities, as I have already shown. In Un chant d’amour, more radically, the body itself intermingles and its boundaries blur. This homoerotic body released in and through the movement of dance is not a stable or singular one, but one that is constantly transforming itself and becoming (other). By the end of the film, the limits between bodies have entirely given way, so that it is no longer possible to tell where one ends and the other begins. A series of shots show a montage of male torsos gliding over one another and interweaving limbs in a way the blurs the distinction between individual bodies. Homoerotic desire is here represented as intercorporeal, as something that opens the borders between bodies and allows them to merge into one another. This representation of a commingling intercorporeality is not only central to Genet’s homoeroticism, but also to his rethinking of the relationship between bodies and representation, or language. The body that writes itself through the language of dance in Genet’s work is not a stable, essential one, secure within its own boundaries, but rather one that is both constituted and opened through the process of self-representation. Like Zarathustra, Genet’s dancers create themselves through the movements of their dance, which is not a transparent reflection of the body but something that actively produces a particular idea or form of corporeality. Thus the performative body in Genet’s work is not simply a blank surface or empty vessel through which meaning is transmitted, but rather something which plays a pivotal role in the construction of meaning, thereby challenging and expanding traditional notions of corporeality. As Vicki Kirby describes, the body is a ‘shifting scene of inscription that both writes and is written’ (1997, p. 61). For Genet, too,


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dance is not simply a mode of expression enacted by the body, but a process of re-inscription informed by that body. These polymorphous, metamorphic bodies, which cannot be contained within the jail cell or on the wrong side of the looking-glass, open up new, homoerotic spaces of representation in Genet’s work, thereby enabling the relationship between bodies and writing to be reconfigured. Genet’s works become, in Alphonso Lingis’s evocative words, love songs ‘sung with voices wet with kisses and semen’ (1997, p. 168). The dance performances seen in ’adame Miroir and Un chant d’amour are hence central to the sexual politics of Genet’s work, and particularly to its resistance of heteronormative assumptions about the male body. As Hadrien Laroche points out in Le Dernier Genet, dance, for Genet, is always a political force because of its capacity to ‘break with the established order’ and to ‘disturb’ the passivity of the world (1997, p. 16). The bodies represented in ’adame Miroir and Un chant d’amour in this way manifest the political potential of dance in Genet’s work, which provides a strategy of resistance, a technique for subverting the sexual and gender discourses imposed by dominant cultures.

Notes 1. ‘The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes’ (Grimm and Grimm, 2003, pp. 432–5). 2. I am indebted to Vicki Kirby for my use of this term, as developed in her Telling Flesh (1997, pp. 7–50). 3. The text was originally published with musical score by Heugel in 1948, and by Paul Morihien in a scenario-only version with L’Enfant criminel in 1949. 4. Parade, with sets by Pablo Picasso and music by Erik Satie, is the most celebrated of these. 5. The nature and outcome of this revolution remain undecided: by the play’s conclusion, the revolutionary leader has castrated himself within the Balcony’s newest room (the Mausoleum) and gunfire is starting again on the streets. 6. Several unpublished scripts—La Nuit venue, Le Bleu de l’œil and Langage de la muraille—can be found in the Genet archives at the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine in France.



Works cited Butler, J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Coe, R. The Vision of Jean Genet (London: Peter Owen, 1968). Genet, J. Dir. Un chant d’amour (France, 1950, 25 mins). —— Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Anthony Blond, 1964a).


Elizabeth Stephens

Genet, J. The Thief’s Journal, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1964b). —— Miracle of the Rose, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Anthony Blond, 1965). —— Fragments … et autres textes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). —— ’adame Miroir, in Fragments of the Artwork, trans. C. Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–7. Grimm, J. and W. Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans, J. Gruelle and J. Zipes, 3rd edn (New York: Bantam Books, 2003). Hanrahan, M. Lire Genet: Une poétique de la différence (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1997). Kirby, V. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Laroche, H. Le Dernier Genet (Paris: Seuil, 1997). Lingis, A. ‘Love Song’, in Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French, eds, D. Fischer and L. R. Schehr (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 167–84. Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961). White, E. Genet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993).


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13 Genet and Cinema: Adaptations and Influence1

The words ‘Genet’ and ‘cinema’ in combination immediately conjure Genet’s cult film Un chant d’amour (France, 1950, 25 mins), which critic Tony Rayns describes as ‘the most famous gay short film in European history’ (letter to the author, 28 July 1986). When I first wrote The Cinema of Jean Genet: Un chant d’amour (1991), the aim of my book was to counteract the suppression and subsequent silence and confusion that had surrounded Un chant d’amour since its inception. Since then, in the UK the film has been reissued in new 35 mm cinema prints, released on video and DVD, and even shown on television. In addition, it has inspired a profusion of critical writing. Less attention, however, has been paid to the influence that Genet’s works—not only Un chant d’amour, but also his plays and novels—have had upon generations of film makers. In order to rectify this situation, this essay presents an overview of adaptations inspired by Genet’s novels and plays, before going on to reveal the impact of his work on Japanese countercultural film of the late 1960s, and contemporary queer cinema.

Adaptations of Genet’s Works Deathwatch


Jane Giles

Rewritten four times between 1943 and 1946, Genet remained dissatisfied with his first play Deathwatch which explores the murderous triangle of rivalry and desire between cellmates vying for the attention of the charismatic Green Eyes, who is condemned to death. The themes and characterizations of the play overlap with those of Miracle Of The Rose, Un chant d’amour (early versions of Deathwatch are dedicated to Genet’s lover Lucien Sénémaud) and Le Bagne. Genet wrote his own (undated) film version of this play, although it is from the published theatrical text 169


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that Barbara Turner and Vic Morrow adapted their bold, gay-themed low-budget independent film, Deathwatch (Vic Morrow, US, 1965, 88 mins). One of the first films to be directly marketed to a gay audience, Deathwatch was quickly buried in the States and never released in the UK. The film was co-produced by Leonard Nimoy who obtained the rights to film Haute Surveillance directly from Genet (although unlike Joseph Strick’s film of The Balcony, Genet had no involvement with the project). Co-producer Nimoy (later to become famous as Spock in the popular television sci-fi series Star Trek) also stars as Lefranc, the small-time thief who eventually murders his rival, alongside Paul Mazursky as Maurice and Michael Forest as Green Eyes. The three actors had already staged a version of the play in 1959. Part of Deathwatch was shot in the nineteenth-century Nevada State Prison where the actors lived for six months to prepare for their roles. Some of the inmates took part in the production and were grimly fascinated by the film’s construction of a guillotine. More freely inspired by Deathwatch than Morrow’s adaptation, the rarely seen Black Mirror (Pierre-Alain Jolivet, Canada/France, 1981, 88 mins) transposes the gender of Genet’s incarcerated ménage à trois. A woman convicted of murdering a young boy is imprisoned among convicts who decide that she must compensate for her crime. A reluctant prisoner who is soon to be paroled is elected to carry out her execution and the prison office is complicit in the conspiracy. The Maids In 1933 France was gripped by the case of the Papin sisters, maids who were condemned to death for the gruesome murder of their harsh bourgeois employers in the provincial town of Mans. Although Genet originally denied that his second play The Maids was based on the case, he later conceded the similarities. Critical response to the play was initially negative, but The Maids has since proved one of Genet’s most enduring works. With Genet’s approval, Nico Papatakis, announced that his directorial feature debut was to be an adaptation of The Maids. But when the press was invited to photograph Jeanne Moreau and Annie Girardot in maid’s uniforms, Genet abruptly withdrew the rights, owing to his aversion to working with celebrated movie stars. Papatakis, instead, returned to the original case of the Papin sisters, to create his acclaimed film Les Abysses (France, 1962, 96 mins). In Les Abysses, the sisters are unpaid servants to the Lapeyres, an impoverished family of bourgeois viticulturists facing bankruptcy unless their house is sold. While the Lapeyres are away with


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their daughter Elisabeth, on a mission of reconciliation with her estranged husband, the servants vent their anguish on the home. The stiflingly affectionate Elisabeth placates the sisters with the promise of a share in the property. But when it becomes apparent that the house will be sold, Elisabeth and her mother are brutally murdered. At its Cannes premiere, critics railed against the film for bringing French cinema into disrepute. The literary world defended it, with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Breton, Jacques Prévert and Genet publishing glowing testimonials in Le Monde (19 April 1963). Genet’s review of Les Abysses was entitled ‘From Beginning to End, a Tornado’: ‘All the sorrow of the world’ … The famous phrase could also describe the tornado from beginning to end that is Les Abysses. One would have to be deaf not to distinguish the weak but previous wail through the growling of the girls about to be pulled out of their slow degradation against their will. The two sisters (only they count in the film) are first seen next to a fire—and already bitten by it. It would be understandable if one cried out against the tenacity with which Nico Papatakis has been able to seize and lead this paroxysm for two hours. But I think one should keep one’s eyes wide open when an acrobat performs a death-defying act. (1991, p. 337) English-speaking critics were less kind. Monthly Film Bulletin described Les Abysses as ‘turgidly directed on a single note of hysterical pressure … hardly the harrowing experience it was presumably intended to be’. Other adaptations of the theatrical text of The Maids have included Gosta Folke’s television movie Jungfrüleken (Sweden, 1966) and The Maids (Christopher Miles, UK, 1974, 95 mins), which was based on Minos Volanakis’s London stage production. In Miles’ overheated version, Susannah York and Glenda Jackson retain the clarity of Genet’s vision as they act sado-masochistic, homicidal role-playing maids. Cinematically oblique visuals capture the text’s radical class hatred. An additional English-language production worthy of note is Robert and Donald Kinney’s film The Maids (US, 1990, 53 mins), which provides the basis for an exploration of the characters’ relationship as twins and of their gay sexualities. ‘Madame’ is substituted by a thirty-second advertisement for Ultress Hair Dye featuring Linda Evans of Dynasty fame. The first French television adaptation of Genet’s stage play was Les Bonnes (1985, 111 mins) by theatre director Michel Dumoulin. This superior production starred Maria Casares and Francine Bergé, who had played opposite her sister Colette in Les Abysses, 20 years earlier.


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The Balcony When his plans to adapt James Joyce’s Ulysses fell through, the American film director Joseph Strick acquired from Genet the rights to his third published play, The Balcony. In an interview with Edmund White, Strick described Genet’s involvement with every detail of the contract, and how they met to work on the screenplay in late 1961 (White, 1993, pp. 530–2). Genet produced a long treatment—a detailed description of the action without dialogue. Strick also wanted a shooting script, but by then Genet, who was also working on other projects, did not wish to commit any further to a collaboration that he had found ‘very irritating’ (ibid., p. 531). The poet and novelist Ben Maddow wrote the final script for The Balcony (US, 1963, 98 mins. Released on DVD in 2000) which differs in some respects from the original play.2 The cast included Shelley Winters as Madame Irma, Peter Falk as the Chief of Police and Leonard Nimoy as the revolutionary, Roger. In a kaleidoscopic clash of reality and illusion, Madame Irma’s brothel continues business as usual against a background of violent revolution. The theatricality of the film knocked against the naturalistic style of 1960s new cinema (typified by the work of John Cassavetes or Shirley Clarke, for example), and Strick’s version of The Balcony was not a critical or commercial success. Querelle The relative failure of Strick’s The Balcony is symptomatic of numerous adaptations of Genet’s plays, and, perhaps, explains the reluctance of directors to tackle The Blacks and The Screens. In the main, the attempt to capture the theatricality of the original stage productions clashed with trends in new realist cinema. The major exception to these ‘failed’ adapations, and probably the most successful cinematic version of Genet’s work to date, is Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s version of Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest. Fassbinder’s film Querelle (Germany/France, 1982, 106 mins) is just one of the reflections on fascism by the New German Cinema of the late 1960s to early 1980s, which included Hitler: A Film From Germany (Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, 1977), The Tin Drum (Volker


Most recently, The Maids has inspired Nancy Meckler’s Sister my Sister (UK/US, 1994, 89 mins) in which two sisters, Christine (Joely Richardson) and Lea (Jodhi May) work as maids for the rigid, yet mercurial Madame Danzard (Julie Walters), and her daughter. The film is shot exclusively within the confines of Madame’s dimly lit bourgeois home, conveying the sense of suffocating claustrophobia first generated by Genet’s play.


Schlöndorff, 1979) and Lili Marleen (Fassbinder, 1980). Querelle also belongs to the genre of radical explorations into sexuality in German film making, which includes the cinema of Werner Schröter, the films of Rosa von Prauheim, Frank Ripploh, Fassbinder’s own Fox and His Friends (1975), and his stunning transsexual tragedy of betrayal, In A Year Of Thirteen Moons (1978). Fassbinder described the plot of Genet’s novel as superficial, ‘an uninteresting, rather third-class crime story’. But Fassbinder engages with the novel first by responding to Querelle’s search for his own identity and contemplation on whether or not he is monstrous, and secondly to Genet’s imagery and creation of an alternative world in which to deal with the discrepancies between objective action and subjective fantasy. Of the book, Fassbinder was thrilled to discover ‘how this strange world with its own laws relates to our reality and draws astonishing truths. … I’m completely aware of the pathos that these specific recognitions may be so painful that they bring us nearer to our own life’ (Fassbinder, 1982). Querelle can be seen as a film about, rather than of Genet’s novel, paying homage to the original medium by incorporating sections of black text—quotations from Plutarch and from the novel itself—coming out of a blinding white page between the lustrous gold and blue images. Fassbinder also associated the fade-up from white (as opposed to the fade-out to black) with a state of wakefulness, rather than dreaming. His aim was not to give maximum visual realization to the scenes described by the book, and he relegated much of Genet’s (simplified) text and dialogue to the narrator. Visually, the film is insistently striking, both timeless and instantly dated, and never less than artificial. A video game machine is played amidst the baroque décor of the Féria. A version of the louche look of the late 1930s is portrayed through slicked-back hair, costumes of sharp white suits with black shirts, and Madame Lysiane’s gown. Equally, leather jackets, shades, jock straps and golden hard hats reference the gay clone iconography of the 1970s. The trappings of sado-masochistic rituals abound and at one point a Calvary procession crosses the path of Querelle and Robert. Bare-chested sailors sweat decorously, their oiled nipples standing out like champagne corks recalling both Cocteau’s exaggerated illustrations for the publication of Querelle of Brest, and Tom of Finland’s famous cartoons. The film’s stylized studio sets are dominated by enormous stone phalluses bathed in the tangerine dream of a permanent false sunset. Peer Raben’s musical soundtrack features an endless celestial chorus of male voices, alongside which Jeanne Moreau performs a song based on Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’: ‘Each man




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Genet and Japanese cinema Translated into Japanese from the late 1950s, Genet’s novels sparked controversy and inspiration for artists, film makers and performers in 1960s Tokyo. Genet’s imagery permeated the city’s cultural representations of sex as social refusal and the alliance of sex with criminality. The gay sexuality and transvestism of Genet’s Montmartre were easily transferable to the Tokyo district of Shinjuku, and his recurring motif of the flower as a metaphor for the body (particularly the sexual organs) had significant currency in Japanese imagery. Moreover, while Genet’s novels express no explicitly political content, they nevertheless connected directly with the 1960s outcry against a constrictive society, and the revolutionary atmosphere of Tokyo counterculture, in which individual sexual acts could be seen to trigger resistance on a collective, social level. Genet visited Tokyo in 1967 and 1969 during the very period when the influence of his work was at its zenith. Although he attended Noh theatre, which impressed him deeply with its coded gestures, Genet apparently had no contact with artists or writers in Japan; his preoccupations had moved on from art, and indeed homosexuality, to politics, particularly his engagement with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. Genet took part in at least one violent student demonstration in Shinjuku during his second visit to Tokyo, the main objective of which was to protest against the Japanese involvement in the Vietnamese war (Japan allowed the US airforce to launch attacks from its bases), and indeed to campaign against military power in general. Despite the fact that Genet did not actively seek to influence the Japanese arts scene, during this period his work was adopted or cited in a range of work. In Nagisa Oshima’s Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief (Japan, 1968), an effeminate young man who shoplifts books is caught by an aggressive woman, and the pair embarks on a sexual odyssey inspired by the student riots of 1968. The film features a key scene in which the Japanese translation of Genet’s novel The Thief’s Journal is brandished and discussed in a bookshop. Among the most emblematic Japanese works around sexual


kills the thing he loves’. Andy Warhol (who designed the film posters) said that Querelle had made him ‘hot for the whole day’ and in general the gay media were enthusiastic about its stylish vision and tangible eroticism (Hollywood producer Scott Meek compared watching the film to finding yourself in somebody else’s wet dream). As well as performing well enough in parts of Europe, the film was destined for cult status, being considered a curiosity by the mainstream and trade press.


exploration and protest is the iconoclastic Funeral Parade Of Roses (Japan, 1969) by Toshio Matsumoto, a film maker of experimental and documentary shorts and a director of Japanese avant-garde theatre. One of the first films to tackle Japan’s contemporary gay scene, and a modern drag parody of the Oedipus myth, the film is set in the ‘Genet’, a Shinjuku gay bar. Tokyo’s most celebrated female impersonator, ‘Peter’, represents the emancipated, westernized ‘woman’, who murders his mother in order to end up in a sexual relationship with his father. The drama takes place against a tide of social history in Tokyo—hippy philosopher rebellion, the drug trade, student battles with police, undeclared war between Shinjuku’s gay community and heterosexual prostitutes. Documentary interviews with the cast are interspersed with the film’s drama.

Genet and queer cinema In addition to Querelle, it is almost impossible not to think of Genet when seeing crime and homosexuality combined in films as diverse as Bertrand Blier’s scabrous comedy Tenue De Soirée (France, 1986) and the clumsy adaptation of John Herbert’s play about brutality in a prison, Fortune And Men’s Eyes (Harvey Hart, Canada, 1971). Furthermore, Genet’s vivid and complex portrait of Divine in Our Lady Of The Flowers was enormously influential in revising screen representations of transvestites. Following on from the music hall stage tradition, early cinema used men dressed as women for standard comic effect in single reel movies, popular US examples of which include Charlie Chaplin in The Masquerader (1914), Wallace Beery in Sweedie (1915), Larry Semon in Stuntman (1927) and numerous impersonations by Stan Laurel. Thereafter in mainstream cinema, crossdressing was at its best in musicals and comedies such as Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, US, 1959). Meanwhile, in the years leading up to and beyond the Stonewall riots of 1969, Our Lady Of The Flowers provided a benchmark for the sexual revolution brewing in US underground films, key examples of which include Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), and Pink Narcissus (Jim Bidgood, 1971). In homage to Genet, Harris Glenn Milstead took the name ‘Divine’ for his outrageous, overweight female persona which became the muse and star of John Waters’s bad-taste classics Pink Flamingos (US, 1972) and Female Trouble (1974).3 In Divine’s wake came John Cameron Mitchell’s creation ‘Hedwig’, and British performer David Hoyle’s ‘The Divine David’, who both combine the politicized anger of punk with an ironic ideal of anti-glamour and a cutting edge wit. In The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, UK/US/Ireland, 1992) the relationship between an IRA terrorist and a gay transvestite of mixed race




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provided an echo of Genet, whose influence can be seen in writer/director Jordan’s recurrent themes of redemption, triangular love stories, desire, revolution and betrayal within a context that questions national and sexual identities. As Japanese counterculture was inspired by Genet’s representations of criminality and homosexuality, so this combination again resonated for gay film makers. The decimation during the 1980s and 1990s of gay communities in the United States and Europe by the AIDS virus saw a devastating combination of grief, fear and vilification. Simultaneously, the UK’s repressive Conservative government introduced a number of measures to set back artistic interpretations of gay sexualities, including the infamous Clause 28, which sought to criminalize the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality. To address these issues, film makers from the experimental margins produced politically defiant, artistically lyrical, and sexually explicit work that regularly quoted from Genet. Visually led by concurrent developments in new digital technologies, pop promos and advertising, the shared sensibilities of these films developed into a recognisable genre: queer cinema. In the United Kingdom, queer cinema defined the work of a clutch of film artists led by poet, punk and patron saint, Derek Jarman. Dedicated to a gay political activist who died of AIDS, Jean Genet Is Dead (Constantin Giannaris, UK, 1986, 25 mins) is a poetic, highly personal collage featuring overlapping images set against the backdrop of readings from Genet’s work, which explore the themes of love, friendship and loss. Cerith Wyn Evans’s Miracle Of The Rose (UK, 1987, 23 mins) was inspired by Genet’s novel. The documentary Exiles Of Love (Toby Kalitowski, UK, 1992, 27 mins) looks at how sexual exile shapes the language of desire. Accounts by interviewees including Neil Bartlett, Derek Jarman and Constantin Giannaris are intercut with stylized sequences inspired by Genet. Reworkings of Un chant d’amour can be found in The Ballad Of Reading Gaol (Richard Kwietniowski, UK, 1988, 12 mins), a striking interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s prison poem narrated by Quentin Crisp, and in Ecce Homo (Jerry Tartaglia, US, 1989, 7 mins) in which optically printed footage from Un chant d’amour is combined with all-male hardcore, in a call to reclaim gay power in the United States. Short adaptations of Genet’s poems also include Possession du condamné (Albert-André Lheureux, Belgium, 1967, 14 mins), based on the 1942 prison poem ‘Le Condamné à mort’, and Le Boxeur Endormi (Karim Dridi, France, 1993, 5 mins), extracted from ‘La Parade’. John Maybury’s Genetron (UK, 1996, 25 mins) is both a ravishing version of Genet’s ‘Le Condamné à mort’, and a reworking of Un chant d’amour. These films


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When Genet died in 1986, it made me realize that all this time, somewhere in the world, he’d been kicking around. What was he thinking when he opened up the paper? What would he have said about AIDS or Reagan or Senator Jesse Helms? It was around this time that I first started thinking about creating a film that would enable some of these issues to interact with themes from Genet’s work. So I suppose it was inevitable that Poison would be a film about deviance. (Director’s statement, 1991) In an ironic parallel to the exhibition of Un chant d’amour in the United States during the 1960s, Poison caused a furore when awarded completion funding by the National Endowment for the Arts. The conservative activist Reverend Donald Wildmon claimed that the film contained ‘explicit porno scenes of homosexuals involved in anal sex’ and Variety erroneously reported repeated images of rear-entry intercourse in a remarkable case of press hysteria (or fantasy). Poison also incurred the wrath of some sections of the gay community, with Haynes accused of ‘swirling in a cesspit of his own making’. The controversy fuelled the film’s impressive opening week box office take of $41,511 at a single cinema. The opening titles of Poison tell us that what we are about to watch is inspired by Genet’s novels, and the film will quote from Our Lady Of The Flowers, Miracle Of The Rose and The Thief’s Journal. The film also quotes from Un chant d’amour, in that some actors resemble the leading men of Genet’s film, and in the structure of three intercut stories. ‘Hero’ is a reportage-style account of a child who shoots his father before flying away through a window. ‘Horror’ is a black-and-white 1950s B-movie tale of a scientist who inadvertently swallows the hormonal essence of the sex drive, with plague-like results. ‘Homo’ describes the relationship between narrator John Broom and his fellow convict Bolton. Broom and Bolton first meet at borstal, an artificial pastoral idyll with blue skies and flowers where the other boys spit on Broom’s love.4 As in Miracle of The Rose, the spittle becomes a snowstorm of rose petals. In the harsh prison


tend to be relatively straightforward, self-contained adaptations, in comparison with the more audacious re-imaginations of queer cinema. Incorporating direct adaptation of specific scenes from Genet’s novels, as well as being inspired by his work in a broader sense, Todd Haynes’ first feature Poison (US, 1991, 90 mins) is probably the most sustained work to show Genet’s cinematic heritage within the context of queer cinema. Haynes has described the film as a homage, and said that his aim was to make the themes of Genet’s works interact with current issues:


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sequences, the older Broom and the other prisoners trudge, shackled, around a shit bucket in a sequence also adapted from the same novel. Intercutting these scenes with those of the two other stories, draws a series of parallels. Bolton’s childhood theft can be linked to the crimes of the masochistic Ritchie Beacon (‘Hero’) which confirm Genet’s opinion that the family is the first prison cell. The AIDS metaphor of ‘Horror’ is close to the abject but transformative spitting sequence. Each story involves persecution, and ends with a transfiguration (Ritchie flies away; the Scientist is transformed by his condition and meets the angels; Broom sees Bolton through flowers). Ultimately, Poison is more than the sum of its parts. It is a narratively complex and often puzzling celebration of desire, deviance and transgression. To that extent, Haynes’s film is emblematic of the queer approach to Genet. In the main, queer film makers who cite Genet as their inspiration all appear to share his refusal of so-called ‘positive images’ of homosexuality, and his resistance to being assimilated into and by mainstream society. This, of course, also explains why Genet continues to be such a source of energy for avant-garde film makers in general: his subversive celebration of difference can be used for multiple and diverse cinematic ends, most notably for an exploration of gender and sexual politics.

Notes 1. This essay is an edited extract from Jane Giles’s The Cinema of Jean Genet (1991), a popular guide to Genet’s cinema. The editors have attempted to maintain the spirit of Giles’s original essay and have kept to the original formatting. 2. See Carl Lavery’s interview with Joseph Strick (Chapter 14) in this volume. 3. England’s sole homage to Genet came from mime artist Lindsay Kemp, whose lavish stage production Flowers (1968) was filmed and broadcast by the BBC, and also partly inspired David Bowie’s single Gene Genie. See Martin Hargreaves’s essay (Chapter 8) in this volume. 4. Editor’s note: The French genet translates into English as ‘broom’ in the botanical sense.


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Works cited Fassbinder, R. W. Querelle Filmbuch (Munich: Schirmer, 1982). Genet, J. L’Ennemi déclaré: Textes et entretiens, ed. Albert Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). Giles, J. The Cinema of Jean Genet: Un chant d’amour (London: BFI Publishing, 1991). White, E. Genet (London: Chattos & Windus, 1993).


Part VI


Performing Genet





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Joseph Strick is an American filmmaker who lives in Paris. His work includes Savage Eye (1959), Ulysses (1967), Interviews with Mai Lai Veterans (1970), Tropic of Cancer (1970) and James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1979). In this interview, Carl Lavery talks to Strick about the processes involved in adapting his film version of The Balcony (1963). Strick’s film reduces the fundamental ambiguity of the original text by cutting the roles of three characters—Chantal, Arthur and the Envoy—whose onstage/offstage movements contribute to the equivocal feel of the play. Two other changes are worthy of note: first, Roger no longer castrates himself in Irma’s salons; and second, the Chief of Police is deprived of his descent to the grave. Rather, both characters are left shivering together outside the brothel at the end of play, as a new revolution is on the verge of breaking out. Carl Lavery: Joseph Strick:

Why did you decide to film The Balcony? It’s not an obvious choice for a film adaptation. It’s a brilliantly conceived work that’s totally relevant to how we live today. Genet explores how society is constructed and shows us that there is nothing separating the person in the street from the figures of authority who rule our lives. The gas man who plays the Bishop in the brothel heads an actual church at the end of it—and more to the point, he’s going to be just as effective as a ‘real’ bishop. Genet’s plays deal in essentials, with how we construct our culture. Unlike other absurdist playwrights such as Ionesco and Beckett, his work is always historically situated. The politics are in the foreground.


An Interview with Joseph Strick

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Was Genet happy to have his play filmed? Yes. First, he asked to see my film the Savage Eye, and he liked it very much. Then he wanted to know about the basic concept for the film. When I told him that the brothel, ‘Le Grand Balcon’, was to be a film studio, he absolutely loved it. He agreed to write a treatment for the play and we worked on it for two months together. We didn’t disagree during the whole process. The only things that caused him bother were those moments in the play which he said he didn’t understand: the role of the Chief of Police, the nature of the revolution and, of course, the ending. He was really confused about how to finish the play, which is why, I guess, he kept revising and changing it. He had no problem, though, with the changes I made. He told me he liked them. In the credits it says that the script-writer, Ben Maddow, did the screenplay, not Genet. Yes. There were a few gaps in Genet’s script—it was too short (50 pages when it should have been 100); it was in French; and also, Genet didn’t specify direction, or tell us where the cameras were to point. It was an indication, half-way between a treatment and a screenplay. We needed a conventional screenplay for shooting purposes, and that is where Ben came in. Despite his earlier work on Un chant d’amour, Genet was essentially a wordsmith. I don’t think images were the source of his imagination. Ben supplied the shooting-script. Did you keep much of Genet’s original treatment? It would be interesting to know exactly what material Genet contributed to the film. I don’t have a copy, unfortunately. I gave him the concept of the film studio. He wrote scenes around that, and then we adapted and added to what he gave us. Do you remember who wrote the speech for the Chief of Police, Peter Falk, when he addresses the nation from the brothel? This incident doesn’t appear in any of the four stage versions. Some of it was extemporized and some of it was written. Peter gets deeply involved in what he does, and he felt that the Chief of Police’s primary motivation was nationalism. So he asked for a speech expressing that aspect of his character. That night, Ben produced a seven-minute speech which Peter learnt by heart and performed the next day. You used Frechtman’s translation of the play. Did Ben Maddow have to rewrite a lot of that?


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A bit, but nothing enormous. Genet was very suspicious of Frechtman’s translations, and he used to play a game in which he would criticize the translation in Frechtman’s presence. Frechtman would be in the room and he would say things to me like, ‘It is not very good is it? It doesn’t really work, does it?’. That always made me feel uncomfortable. The problem with Frechtman’s work is that he tries to keep to the original French. That’s why it sometimes appears ‘clunky’. However, I still think there is value in Frechtman’s text. We were happy with most of it. In the scene between the Bishop, Jeff Corey, and the penitent girl [Joyce Jameson], you cut a lot of the difficult existential language. Was that to simplify things for a cinema audience who might not have been used to Genet’s writing? No. We cut it mainly because it’s a little repetitive and slows down the action. We were determined to keep the poetic quality of Genet’s writing. Nevertheless, the film is a lot less ambiguous than the play. You cut the character of the Envoy who arrives at the brothel from the palace and yet seems to be au fait with the rules of the house. There is no Chantal and thus no real link between Roger and the whorehouse; and we know from the opening scenes that the revolution has its own dramatic reality as a phenomenon that is very definitely located outside the brothel. In the play, things are much more equivocal. We didn’t need either Chantal or the Envoy in the film. There was no rationale for them. In my film, it was Roger’s failure to come to power that brought him to The Balcony. Genet was perfectly happy with the changes we made. The revolutionary scenes always bothered him. He didn’t know what to do with them and was unsure about the ‘reality’ of the revolution. Chantal’s death might work in the theatre—where it’s played silently—but it doesn’t work in the cinema. Working in cinema is different from working in theatre: you have to make definitive decisions and choices. You don’t have the same flexibility to change things night after night. Once it’s done, it’s done. The opening credits of your film are striking. The footage establishes a sense of violence and contrasts very strongly with the calmness and boredom in the brothel. Where did you get the footage? It’s all newsroom material. Some of it is taken from the liberation of Paris, some from riots in Argentina and other bits are


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from scuffles between police and protestors in England. The collage effect was meant to establish the revolution in the play as a universal process, something that is not historically specific or linked to one country. The other fascinating point about the film is the idea of surveillance. Shelley Winters (Irma) and Lee Grant (Carmen) are constantly spying on people with hidden cameras and looking through their files. To me, it seems that the film comments on Cold War paranoia in the United States. I’m thinking here of J. Edgar Hoover and his fear of Communism. Would you agree? Well, the film was certainly affected by the Cold War, but it is not a Cold War film, in the sense, say, of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. If anything, Genet’s play—like The Blacks and The Screens—is about colonialism. We tried to underline this aspect of the work by setting the play in a Banana Republic in Latin America. In my film, Peter Falk is a nationalist dictator. Did you have any problems with censorship? Genet’s play did, didn’t it? The British censors were really draconian back then. At first, they were not going to give the film a certificate. Then they said it could open in London with an ‘X’ certificate. The film was well received; there was no scandal and it went on nationwide release after that. Was that because the film was perceived as being morally dangerous in some sense? From a sexual point of view, it’s pretty timid. It’s titillating, but there’s no nudity. And the language is tame. The British Establishment was frightened by it. The censor felt it was disrespectful towards authority—which, of course, it is. You have to remember, too, that the Lord Chamberlain had insisted on cutting Peter Zadek’s 1957 production of the play. In Britain, it was thought to be a scandalous work. How did you get Stravinsky to do the music for the film? Well, I have this theory: ask the best person in the world first and then if you fail go to the next person. In the 1960s, the greatest composer alive was Stravinsky, so I went to him. I showed him the film and he loved it and agreed to do the music. After the film was over, I tried to pay him for his score but he wouldn’t accept a thing. He gave us the music as a gift.


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How did you feel the film was received? The British critic Jane Giles feels it suffered because it went against the neo-realist mood of early 1960s cinema (See Chapter 13 by Jane Giles in this collection). Well, it had a good size audience. Of course, the film wasn’t realistic. How could it be? Jean Genet is hardly John Cassavetes. It’s not just Jane Giles who says that. One of the criticisms levelled at the film by the critics of Sight and Sound and The Monthly Film Bulletin is that it was too theatrical. Do you think there is something about Genet’s plays that resists the camera, something, perhaps, to do with his use of language? Yes, I think there is a problem with that. The camera doesn’t like to linger on speech. It moves too fast. This means that theatrical language, with its rhetoric and oratory, has no place in cinema. Despite that, I felt that the actors in The Balcony did a good job. Peter Falk, Jeff Corey, Lee Grant, Peter Brocco and Leonard Nimoy were excellent. Is that why Genet’s film Un chant d’amour works so well—it has no words and just images? Most certainly. That’s exactly what he said to me when we worked together on The Balcony. If he did another script, he told me he would write from image to image. He realized that all the images needed to be specified in cinema. For me, the problem with your movie is somewhat different. I feel that Genet’s play, precisely because it’s written to be performed ‘live’ in a theatre, makes us immediately and physically aware of being voyeurs. Cinema doesn’t really do that. Sure, I think he glories in voyeurism. He makes us face that fact. But in cinema, it’s easy to lose yourself in celluloid. It all takes place in the dark. In the theatre, you are more aware of watching and of being watched. It disturbs voyeurism on a more profound level. Brecht was more interested in theatre than in cinema because of its greater distancing effect. That’s why Irma addresses the audience directly at the end. You can only get that exchange in live performance. You have to find cinematic equivalents for the theatre. That’s why, at the end of the film, Shelley Winters speaks directly to the camera—and, of course, directly to the audience. Of


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J. S.:

course, I could never get the same feeling across as in live performance. My focus was on the artificiality of the whole situation: the false sets, the music, the clunky sound effects, etc. Is there anything, with hindsight, that you would change about your movie? Not much. Like all of my children, I love The Balcony, despite its faults.


15

The production of The Screens/Los biombos by Cornerstone Theater Company and Peter Sellars in East Los Angeles in 1998 was one of the most exciting and daring responses to Genet’s work to have emerged in recent years. In this interview Carl Lavery talks to Bill Rauch (co-founder and artistic director) and Lynn Jeffries (designer) of Cornerstone Theater about the challenges involved in staging The Screens as a community theatre project and the processes of translating the play into a bilingual, hybrid text. Carl Lavery:

Bill Rauch:

Lynn Jeffries:

How did The Screens/Los biombos fit the communitybased ethos of Cornerstone? Genet is not usually seen as offering a positive view of community, and the play itself is incredibly complex and metaphysical. Although one of Cornerstone’s goals is to celebrate community, we feel that true celebration includes hard questions and challenges. We have used several tragedies as source texts over the years, including The Oresteia on a Native American reservation and Romeo and Juliet in a racially segregated community in Mississippi, among many others. The Screens was Peter Sellars’ idea. I immediately liked his impulse because it was ambitious and difficult, and therefore to me seemed to respect the beauty and pain of the community itself. I also liked its epic scale, which felt appropriate to a large-scale, community-based theatre project. Probably everyone has their own version of the Cornerstone ethos. I’d say that we aim to produce


An Interview with Bill Rauch and Lynn Jeffries of Cornerstone Theater Company

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Carl Lavery

C. L.: B. R.:

C. L.: B. R.:

C. L.:

L. J.:

great theatre with and for communities who are underserved by larger, more traditional theatres. Our choice of whose stories to tell on stage is political, but our productions are not message-driven, not what people usually think of as ‘political theatre’. We like complexity, interesting stories and beautiful language as much as we like to connect with communities. The Screens satisfied both needs, being a beautiful and challenging play about, amongst other things, the distortions people and communities undergo from the stresses of poverty and oppression. Why was the play transposed from Algeria in the 1950s to Los Angeles in the 1990s? Cornerstone’s work is almost always contemporary and local in its setting, whether the text is based on an old play, or is completely original. It is a primary aesthetic strategy for us to reflect the lives of the audience onstage, in as direct a manner as possible. I think the adaptation of The Screens is one of the most successful we have ever created. It was detailed and rich. How did the audience respond to that play? Responses were all over the map. Some people were bored and quite angry. Others were completely energized. It was undeniably a serious work of art. Could you talk about how the translation was created? Was there an attempt to keep the rhythms of Genet’s poetry in the translation? Did the actors find it easy to speak? The translation was created in two steps. First, I did a very rough translation of the whole play from the French. I farmed out three or four scenes to my stepfather, Brian O’Neil, and an old friend and colleague, Jan Mabry, though I revised their work to make it consistent with the rest. Then Peter Sellars, Gloria Alvarez, Pete Galindo and I met several days a week at my apartment to create the adaptation. We gathered around the computer with me at the keyboard and, starting from the beginning, worked our way through my rough translation line by line. Sellars took the leading role, and Gloria was responsible for the vivid and


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An Interview with Bill Rauch and Lynn Jeffries 189

From time to time we referred back to the original French, to check for nuances I might have missed (plenty, I’m sure!), and we surrounded ourselves with dictionaries, but otherwise we didn’t have any research materials that I recall. Well, we did once refer to a souvenir placemat I had that depicted the different cacti of the Southwest. Sellars liked ‘Jumping Cholla’ the best, and we put it in the script. But for the most part we worked from our own collective knowledge of contemporary life in Los Angeles. I think we did make a conscious effort to keep the rhythms and flavour of the original, and I think the final script felt very much like Genet, even with the bilingualism and the shift of time and place. I also think the cast found it very speakable. C. L.:

B. R.:

C. L.:

L. J.:

C. L.:

B. R.:

The play was performed on the second floor at the East LA Skills Center in Lincoln Heights. Did you consider the staging to be environmental or even site-specific? I consider the staging to be both environmental and at times site-specific, taking advantage of the nooks and crannies of the space itself. In Cornerstone parlance, site-specific usually means that the story of the play is set in the space in which it’s being produced. In that strict sense, this production was not site-specific. Did you read any of Genet’s instructions on how to stage the play? He wanted it to take place in a graveyard in the heart of Paris. I think I did read his instructions at one point, but I don’t remember Sellars ever referring to them. As a designer, I always like to read the playwright’s instructions to see if there’s anything interesting there, but I don’t often use them as a guide. Do you think that Genet’s theatre invites a creative response from contemporary practitioners? Genet always seems to want to break out of the conventional theatrical space. It does seem like Genet throws down the gauntlet and demands bold choices from his interpreters. Otherwise, it feels like you’re running away from him in fear.


deliciously interwoven Spanish, but it was a very active, collaborative process, and we all made substantial contributions.


Carl Lavery

L. J.:

C. L.: L. J.:

C. L.:

B. R.:

C. L.: B. R.:

C. L.:

B. R.:

I think any play on the page invites a creative response from contemporary practitioners. Maybe Genet does to a greater extent because what’s on the page seems so impossible to produce. Still, Cornerstone re-invents everything, from Genet to Shakespeare to Sanskrit Drama to Noël Coward, so perhaps you’re asking the wrong people. What cuts did you make to the text? Ah. Well, this was a point of disagreement between Sellars and me. He didn’t want to make any cuts during the writing process, although I suggested it several times. In the end, we adapted as much of it as we could in the time we had (we may have skipped a few scenes to get to the point where everyone’s dead—I don’t have the original in front of me), and then Sellars rehearsed as much as he could rehearse in the time he had, and that was what we performed. How long did the process take? It’s a huge, epic play and you used professional and non-professional actors. Was that a problem? Genet demands a lot from his actors? We worked on the play throughout the fall of 1997 and the production didn’t open until mid-January 1998. The opening was postponed from late fall to early in the New Year. We have worked with a mixture of professional and non-professional actors on most of our work for 20 years, including Shakespeare as source text, so although the Genet was challenging, it was not more challenging than many other Cornerstone ventures. What role did Peter Sellars play in the production? It was Sellars’ idea to use The Screens as the source text. Sellars led the adaptation and casting processes and of course the design and rehearsal processes. But because he was working with a consensus-run ensemble at Cornerstone, which was such a different structure from his usual working environments, there were naturally communication breakdowns at times. Could you talk about how you staged two specific scenes? Primarily, Tableau Twelve when the rebels spray paint their ‘crimes’ on the screens, and Tableau Sixteen when there are three layers to the stage. Both of these scenes are incredibly dynamic and take up a lot of space. Is this why you staged the play on the second floor of the East LA Skills Center? Tableau Twelve involved extraordinary spray paint art that was created in advance by local graffiti artists. Sellars and


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C. L.: B. R.:

L. J.:

I had a disagreement about this section because I wanted the actors/characters to paint the images onstage as Genet suggests, and Sellars wanted the scene to be more abstract and ritualized by performing it in front of pre-painted images. By using a huge space in a dynamic site-specific manner, Sellars’ work was in the Cornerstone tradition of using nontraditional spaces in site-specific ways, including moving the audience to different spaces for various scenes. I was moved by the raw, unfinished space as a metaphor for the community. In Tableau Twelve, everyone was dressed in orange prison uniforms in front of a graffiti mural, holding up cigarette lighters, while two cast members made speeches into microphones. I’m not sure we actually got to Tableau Sixteen in our staging, and we certainly didn’t use the multi-levelled stage space that Genet talks about. The play ended with a scene among the dead, which was staged like this: the audience enters a large rectangular area with Mexican blankets covering the floor; it is then invited to sit on blankets and served coffee and Mexican sweet bread shaped like skulls. Thirtythree television sets, facing straight down, are suspended over the heads of the spectators. Each one is running a videotape— a close-up of one of the 33 cast members. Actors gather around the edges of the audience on all four sides and say lines from the scene in the play, but all overlapping, so there’s no sequence. At a certain point, they finish and take a bow. Do you think it’s a positive or a negative work? It’s much more complicated than positive or negative. It’s a work that confronts and challenges and enrages and frightens. It’s a work of immense beauty. I think it’s a harsh, negative work written so brilliantly and beautifully, and with an oddly pervasive love, that it ends up feeling somehow positive.


An Interview with Bill Rauch and Lynn Jeffries 191


Illustration 4 Saïd and Leïla in The Screens/Los biombos, East LA Skills Center in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, 1998. Peter Sellars (dir.).


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Illustration 5 The Screens/Los biombos, East LA Skills Center in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, 1998. Peter Sellars (dir.).


16

Jean-Baptiste Sastre is from an emerging generation of promising French directors. His work includes Genet’s Deathwatch (Paris, 1997), Labiche’s L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine (Paris, 2000) and Marlow’s Tamburlaine (Paris, 2001). In January 2004, he staged a major production of The Screens at the Salle Gémier of the Théâtre National de Chaillot, Paris. It met with mixed reviews, but was conceptually an intriguing piece, as this interview reveals.

Clare Finburgh: Jean-Baptiste Sastre:

What attracted you to The Screens? I’ve always been fascinated by Genet’s works. After Deathwatch, I was keen to stage The Screens. It’s an immense fresco, a magnificent epic, that at the same time contains intricately detailed and sublime poetry. It’s both realist and poetic, and effaces this distinction. The text is chiselled and crafted in the way that Genet describes Giacometti’s sculptures, yet it’s loose and inchoate. It’s extremely complicated, verging on the incomprehensible, and is practically impossible to stage. Patrice Chéreau, by the way, famously said that The Screens was the first play he had staged without understanding what it meant. It’s like being face-to-face with a wall or a monster. And yet it’s enticing and alluring. It seems both familiar, and strange. These contradictions attracted me to the work.


An Interview with Jean-Baptiste Sastre

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Clare Finburgh

C.F.:

J-B.S.:

C.F.: J-B.S.:

You say The Screens is an extremely difficult text to understand. What was your strategy for approaching and interpreting the text? You have the advantage, when you arrive after great directors like Roger Blin and Chéreau, that traces of their work remain. These artists uncover and explain the text’s mysteries for us. I researched their notes and letters, and the letters of Maria Casares, and La Famille des Orties by François Regnault and Bernard-Marie Koltès, who worked with Chéreau. These were all invaluable resources. I also looked at Genet’s stage directions, end-of-tableau commentaries, and letters to Blin. I found these useful, but dated. He wrote them in response to the rehearsals he’d attended for Blin’s 1966 production. So they correspond to a specific production and specific actors—Casares, Barrault, Renaud, etc. I consulted these stage directions and commentaries, but often found that I had to depart from them because they’re not relevant to all productions and all actors. Every time a play is staged, it’s interpreted anew, and invariably departs from previous productions. Genet himself made it easy for people to get rights to stage his plays, so I’m not sure he saw Blin’s production and his own commentaries as the definitive version of the play. Nonetheless, I found all these traces of past productions were a mine of information and ideas. How did the actors go about developing their characters? The characters in The Screens are highly complex. Are they psychologically rounded, or are they poetically stylized? Or are they both, or neither? Both I and the actors put a lot of research and preparation into the roles before rehearsals, but every day we had the impression that we arrived blind on the stage, and had to feel our way along and through the text. You can analyse and prepare the text of The Screens as much as you want. But as soon as you try to attach a fixed meaning to it, it starts to shift, and undermines any clear ideas you might once have had about it. The actors in the Chaillot production felt that they were inhabiting a foreign body that constantly moved about and relocated at its own will. It was exhausting for them. It’s an extremely demanding text for actors because meanings seem to consolidate for a moment, and then evaporate. And at the same time, the text is written with incredible precision and detail. You have probably


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heard of Casares’ anecdote about Genet taking off his shoe and throwing it at her during rehearsals for the 1966 production because she hadn’t said the word ‘Moon’ with enough precision and passion. She says in an interview that she arrived at the point where she was going to resign because she simply didn’t understand the text. Genet had to beg her to stay. And the old rock n’ roll star Dick Rivers, who played the Lieutenant in our production, said that after doing The Screens, he could take on anything! The actors said they never knew whether they had got it right or not, which leads to a great sense of insecurity. Perhaps this is Genet’s intention—to undermine them as rounded, integral individuals, and to force them to explore more symbolic forms of characterization. Particular attention was paid in your production to the actor’s voice. The emphasis on varying the tone, pitch and intensity of the voice seemed almost Artaudian. For example in Tableau Two, Julie Pinod, who played Leïla, screamed almost all of her lines. And then other actors almost whispered theirs. Genet calls the text of The Screens ‘a very gentle music’. It was clear that you had worked on the text’s musicality. We found beautiful rhythms that Genet had incorporated into the dialogues. Some of the lines scan like songs. Dick Rivers, for example, sang some of the Lieutenant’s famous monologues as if Genet had intentionally written them as songs. Julie Pinod is a graduate from the Paris Conservatoire and is therefore trained in how to vary the range and quality of her voice in order to enhance the meaning of the dialogue. Eléonore Hirt, one of France’s oldest and finest stage actors, who played Kadidja, produced some vocal sounds that conveyed the horrors of war and violence with incredible force. The story behind the actor who played Saïd, Mounzer Baalbaki, is altogether different. I was in Lebanon because I’d wanted to go and see what it was about the Middle East that had inspired Genet so much when he went there with the French army as a teenager. Baalbaki was working as a stage hand in Beirut’s main theatre. I was watching him one day, and found his gestures and movements intrinsically theatrical, so asked him to play Saïd in Paris. He didn’t speak French, but he went to the great effort of learning


An Interview with Jean-Baptiste Sastre 195


Clare Finburgh

C.F.:

J-B.S.:

C.F.:

J-B.S.:

his entire part phonetically because he said he found the rhythm and resonance of the words and syntax so inherently musical and physical. There was a definite emphasis on acousticity in your production. Not only that of the actors’ voices, but also of the props: the play began with the Mother dancing on a pile of stones that knocked and clicked under her feet; Malika in Tableau Two rolled around in a pile of junk which clattered and clanged; Saïd’s hovel was represented by a steel cupboard filled with hundreds of suspended kitchen utensils that jangled when the Nettle Family members squeezed themselves into it; the General’s medals and Warda’s jewellery jingled as the characters moved; even Genet’s screens were replaced by acoustic motifs. For example, a metal frame with tinkling suspended hands and feet cut out of sheet aluminium denoted the acts of terror committed by Kadidja’s rebel fighters; or from a similar frame the rattling objects that Leila stole were suspended. The play was alive with sounds. Did you want this emphasis on acousticity to denote the overt aestheticization that Genet accords all aspects of his theatre? One of my main aims with this production was to remove the spurious polemical content that many critics and directors attribute to it. It’s an aesthetic triumph more than anything else. Your theatre has been described as ‘difficult’ and ‘exclusionist’ for precisely this reason: it seems to be comprised of a series of poetic symbols without any coherence to bind them together. You created innumerable visual images and acoustic effects but they didn’t seem to build an overall architecture. The signification of certain symbols was largely unclear. I recall a captivating moment when, in Tableau Four, a bundle of five thin poles several metres high was untied and they spread out to form a spindly hand which any reader of the play would recognize as Sir Harold’s glove that he left to guard the native orange grove workers in his absence. But other moments were rather more arcane, for example when Saïd arrived in his final scene wearing a snorkelling mask and fins. I had a sense that there was no governing aesthetic or ideological principle in your production. It’s not up to me to steer the spectators in a particular direction. It’s up to them to make sense of the visual and acoustic


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signs, symbols and images on stage. What the spectator makes of them isn’t my problem. I’m not trying to be egocentric or self-obsessed here, nor to ignore the spectator. I think that Genet actually writes this absence of direction into his text, and this is what I attempted to convey. He creates a panorama of different elements which make references to thousands of years of history and society, and then abandons them or allows them to drift away. One of the main points made by The Screens is that meaning and truth escape our total control, and this is what the spectator has to acknowledge when watching the play. I suppose the only coherence I offered the production was an absence of coherence. This absence of control was perhaps conveyed through the increasing chaos that emerged on stage. At the beginning of the play, the front of the stage was covered by two fairly manageable piles of junk: old army helmets, a bathtub, cooking utensils. … From Tableau Five onwards, the stage was covered more and more in strips of ripped cloth, shredded blankets, strands of upholstery stuffing, yellow and red balloons representing Sir Harold’s oranges, until every inch was covered in mess and stuff. You’re right about the chaos. Or, as I see it decay. Genet invites images, events, characters and concepts into his text, and then precipitates their decay, their disintegration, their destruction. I wanted to show this descent into chaos on stage, but I don’t think I achieved it particularly well. Chaos in art can only be represented successfully if it’s controlled, conceptualized, aestheticized. It’s not false modesty, but I don’t think I attained the delicate balance necessary between chaos and control. Chaos and destabilization are hugely important concepts in The Screens, as I’ve said. But they’re not purely destructive. They enable new images, events, characters and concepts to be born on the site of death and decay. I tried to show this when the dead characters emerged like butterflies from cocoons. The stage was covered in wreckage, debris and waste. So much so, that by the end of the production run, there were actually flies living and breeding in the piles of junk on the stage, and the actors had to perform among swarms of them. But, as Genet often says in his writings, from decay can emerge beauty and poetry. So my way of conveying the Dead in The Screens was to have dead characters


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Clare Finburgh

C.F.: J-B.S.:

emerge from amongst all the mess, out of huge paper chrysalises. These pupae resembled death shrouds, but at the same time I wanted them to convey the idea of butterflies rising out from the detritus. So would you say that The Screens could be defined as an optimistic work? I’m not sure fixed oppositions such as optimistic and pessimistic, or affirmative and negative, exist in Genet. I certainly don’t think it’s a play that’s positive in the sense that it might celebrate anything as specific as anti-colonialism. The Screens doesn’t treat decolonization or Algeria. If you read what Genet or Blin wrote at the time they staged The Screens in 1966, they never once mention the word Algeria. I feel very strongly that to say The Screens refers to the Algerian War or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, or the Iraqi War, severely reduces its scope, and ultimately kills it. Because the Chaillot production took place during the occupation of Iraq, I had to be careful not to trigger references to the international political situation. This is a play that speaks not just about the time of decolonization or about our time, but about universal time in the classical sense. It deals with generalities like decomposition, decay, destabilization, loss of meaning, death, and then goes on to show the beauty, poetry, renewed meaning, and life that can emerge from these so-called negative experiences. So yes, there is a positive, or an ethical element to the play. Regnault speaks of how Rabelais finds abjection in beauty, and Genet finds beauty in abjection.


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From 1978 to 1986, Terry Hands was co-artistic director at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) with Trevor Nunn, and then sole artistic director from 1986 to 1991. Along with Peter Brook, he has arguably been Genet’s most influential champion in Britain. In 1971, he directed his and Barbara Wright’s translation of The Balcony at the Aldwych Theatre, London, and in 1987, he restaged the play as part of the RSC’s aborted Genet season at the Barbican Theatre, London. Hands is currently Director of Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Wales.

Carl Lavery:

I’d like to start with a double question. First, how did you come across Genet’s work? Second, what attracted you, in particular, to The Balcony, which you translated with Barbara Wright? Terry Hands: Like most people of my generation, I discovered Genet at university. I’ve forgotten what I read originally, but it was probably Deathwatch or The Maids. In the Drama Society at Birmingham, we were fascinated by Genet because of his love of anarchy, his obsession with power and his interest in the psychology of oppression. The double-game in Genet between oppressor and oppressed always intrigued me—and, of course, it was vaguely shocking and sexual. When I was invited to direct at the RSC in the late 1960s, I decided I wanted to do The Balcony properly. I’d spoken to Peter Brook about his production in Paris and he confessed that he’d been unhappy with it. According to his account, he had cut the revolutionary scenes the night before the play opened and had always regretted doing


An Interview with Terry Hands

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Carl Lavery

so. If you don’t have the revolution in The Balcony, you don’t— at least, to my mind—have a play. I wanted to do The Balcony in a version where the revolution was restored. The problem was that in the existing English translation I’d read by Bernard Frechtman, the revolution was left out. I always saw this as an attempt to make Genet respectable for an English audience. So I started to explore the idea of working on a new translation and staging a different play. C.L.: Could you talk a little about the translation process? When I spoke to Barbara Wright, she suggested that it was mostly your work and not hers. T.H.: Not really. I knew there were several versions of the play in French. The first version which was privately circulated was different from the second, which included all the political scenes. In the first one there are about six scenes and in the second about fifteen. In the third version—the one that Frechtman translated into English—the revolutionary debate between Roger and Marc is cut entirely, which means that the revolution is associated with Roger, who, as you know, castrates himself in despair at the end of the play. My French wasn’t very good in those days, so I started working with Barbara. Barbara’s French is remarkable, but, as is often the case with translators, her English was a little halting. We worked together through the versions week after week until we started to piece together what we thought was the original version of the play. We were also trying to find a different language, to make the play more up-to-date, more natural. The Frechtman translations are terribly wooden. They stick too closely to the French, which just doesn’t work on the British stage, and they seem very 1950s. Frechtman has no sense of Genet’s poetry; his translations are too polite! We were striving to fuse the poetic with the profane. We wanted the gas man to speak like a gas man, and to find a way of achieving that without being overtly regional. The other thing to bear in mind, of course, is that French is a more limited language than English. The whole idea behind the creation of the Académie Française was to police the language and to purify it. In French you are working from a reduced palette. A Racine play has about two or three thousand words in it, where a Shakespeare play has a vocabulary of between about six and seven thousand words. This means that


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C.L.:

T.H.:

C.L.:

T.H.:

gesture and sound are important. English is the reverse, I think. For us—and this is why, I believe, we don’t have a commedia dell’arte tradition—theatre is about language. So when we translated Genet into English, we wanted to add linguistic variety and colour to the play. Were you tempted to cut the rhetoric of the Bishop in Tableau One? In my experience, when English actors read this, they are usually lost. They don’t know what it means, and it’s hard for them to speak it. Well, be careful. There’s a part of his rhetoric which is more serious than you think. We wanted to keep that in our translation. It’s important to the feel and thus to the meaning of the play. It has to be there. When The Balcony keeps its revolutionary scenes and uses the type of naturalistic language we tried to give it, its political statement is, I think, very clear and coherent. Whether it is through the appropriation of symbols like Chantal, or the way the revolutionary leader Roger ends up playing Chief of Police in the brothel, it’s a play about the failure of revolution. We’ve seen the same scenario played out in country after country—that terrible situation where yesterday’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s dictator. Do you think it’s as clear-cut as that? Is there no political hope in Genet? Your play seems all the more optimistic for having the revolutionaries in it. No, I don’t think there’s much political hope in the play. Genet is just showing you how it is. He points out that people’s desire to worship is far more important than actually having a church. Do you know that extraordinary Goya painting where there is a tree with a monk’s robe over it and people are still praying? They seem to be praying to the tree, but the point is that they are really praying to the costume. Now that’s just like The Balcony. In fact, for me, that’s the very essence of the play. In it, costume and role are everything. That’s what everybody wants to worship. Genet was putting this on the stage at a time when no one else was doing it. His vision is extraordinary. He shows you how the establishment works and then how the revolutionaries work. And what you see, of course, is that the revolutionaries are hell-bent on reproducing the very system they want to overthrow. In the scenes we restored to the play, the characters Marc and Roger are based, respectively, on the historical figures of Robespierre and Danton. By going back to


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Carl Lavery

the French Revolution—which, in a way, is the protype for all revolutions—we could show that the play was about revolution as a concept, as an idea. I wanted to highlight what happens when people like Robespierre get to power. Like Robespierre, Marc is very cold, very rational and ruthlessly efficient. Roger is more of an idealist. He wants to keep the revolution pure and hates the idea that Chantal will be used as a figure-head for it. He’s the Danton figure. C.L.: Genet’s play is often seen as predicting the failure of the 1968 revolt in Paris and your play was staged in late 1971 in London. Were you aware of commenting on the end of the 1960s, the fact that the so-called revolutionary impulse of that period was empty, a kind of dream? T.H.: To an extent, yes. But as I have just said, Genet’s politics are not limited to a given historical period. They transcend that. You could say, for example, that The Balcony is incredibly relevant to today’s political situation, where you have two opposing blocks—Christian fundamentalism in the United States and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East—who purport to be different, but actually believe in the same thing. It’s Roger and the Chief of Police again, isn’t it? If I had to link Genet’s prescience to any period of history, it wouldn’t be to 1968, but to Watergate. Until Nixon, we still believed in the integrity of government. We had no idea that a President would lie to us, or that politicians were corrupt. I remember a television series called The Power Game which was about oil companies and people who bestrode the world in pursuit of big business. People were fascinated by the power and money of it all, and they invested in it. Then with Nixon, they suddenly learnt that things weren’t so simple: that presidents lied and peered through keyholes. This shift—and we are still living through its shock—was immediately apparent in the drama of the time. When Peter Hall did the ‘Wars of the Roses Trilogy’ in 1963, the dominant character all the way through was Warwick the King-Maker, and Henry VI was a holy fool. When the history plays were done post-Watergate, Warwick was a vain, flawed and corrupt egotist and Henry VI was the first modern man who could not understand why people needed to hit each other with iron bars on English lawns. Suddenly the whole nature of things had changed. What’s amazing about Genet is that he’s writing post-Watergate drama in a pre-Watergate world. That’s where his power lies.


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C.L.: Do you think this is because he’s French? After the Occupation and the Algerian War, the French were, for obvious reasons, more suspicious of their leaders than the British and Americans. T.H.: Of course. You see Genet’s cynicism in the other plays too. The Blacks and The Screens both delight in attacking French culture. But, despite his very blatant attack on the status quo, what you never find in Genet is an idea of a political solution. C.L.: Could you talk about your experience of trying to stage The Balcony in French at the Comédie Française in the early to mid1970s? T.H.: After the success of my Richard III in 1972 at the Comédie Française, I was basically given carte blanche. I wanted to do The Balcony, but Pierre Dux, the artistic director at the time, was totally against the idea. He was a die-hard Gaullist, and the very idea of doing a Genet play at the Comédie Française horrified him. After a couple of years, I finally persuaded him that it would be a way of saying to the world that the Comédie Française had finally come of age. I contacted Genet’s agent, who arranged a meeting with Genet in Paris. It was at night, in a little restaurant that he occasionally went to on the Left Bank. The whole thing came to nothing, though. Genet told me that he didn’t want his plays to be performed at the Comédie Française while he was alive—it symbolized everything about France that he abhorred. C.L.: Do you think the mannered acting style associated with the Comédie Française had anything to do with the failure of the play? Peter Brook, for instance, was aware of the problems that Genet’s plays pose for traditional actors in France. And Walter Donaghue, the director of Howard Brenton’s translation of The Screens at the Bristol Old Vic in 1973, says the same thing about British actors. The best productions of Genet’s plays seem to have been by experimental companies interested in physical theatre, or by directors who adapt the orginal version for their own purposes. T.H.: No, I don’t agree with that at all. I have sympathy with Peter Brook’s view because he was working at a time when the conservatoire style was very prevalent in France. You certainly can’t do Genet that way. But things have changed. Actors are different now. I actually think that it’s a linguistic problem. Genet’s language is dynamic and visceral—it fuses insults with poetry. Actors in France are simply not used to working like that. They




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are used to speaking high French. Brook should have employed street actors rather than the Comédie Française actors. There are plenty of them around. I have worked with a group in Brussels who are called Les Baladins du Miroir. They are part-circus, part-cabaret. These are the people to use. After the disaster of Peter Zadek’s 1957 production of The Balcony at the Arts Theatre Club in London, Genet claimed that he needed a director steeped in Shakespeare for his plays. What do you think he meant by that? That’s interesting. I don’t think you necessarily need to direct Shakespeare to direct Genet, but it’s helpful. You’ve got to have somebody who relishes words. As a sensualist, Genet would want someone who is prepared to explore the sensual idea in the word, not just in the sentence or alexandrine, as the French tend to. The secret would be to pick out the key words in Genet’s text and then to structure the play around them. I think that’s what he means. There are other things that come to mind too. Classical acting is more dynamic and vital in Britain than it is in France. I think that’s what attracted Genet to Shakespeare. This seems a good point to bring up the 1987 Genet season at the Barbican. Why was it aborted? I wanted to retranslate and stage the whole of Genet’s theatre for a British audience. I felt that Frechtman’s disastrous translations denied people access to what Genet had actually written. I knew I could revive our translation of The Balcony and I commissioned David Rudkin to do Deathwatch and The Maids, which, in my opinion, he did superbly. David did his translations as a homage to Genet. He understood Genet’s sexuality, criminality and intelligence. I also asked Wole Soyinka to translate The Blacks. The first draft came back and it was dreadful, absolute rubbish— worse still, it was an adaptation. I spoke to him at length, telling him that I didn’t want an adaptation set on some colonial outpost, but a new translation of Genet’s play. Eventually, he sent us another version which was just as bad. I couldn’t put it on, and nor could I say in public that the RSC had fired a Nobel Prize winner. And I still needed a writer to translate The Screens. Rudkin couldn’t do it because he didn’t have the knowledge of Algeria, and Colin Chambers, the literary manager, didn’t have a name that was obvious. In retrospect, I think Howard Barker would have been the right person. So neither The Blacks nor


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The Screens were translated and it became politically and financially expedient to pull out of the season. Who would have directed The Blacks and The Screens? Soyinka was down to direct The Blacks, and I was going to do The Screens. I knew enough about French history and society, and my set designer Abdul Farrah was Algerian. Intellectually and visually, the play might have worked, but we never got further than sketching out a few ideas for an open-air production. You didn’t feel like using Howard Brenton’s 1973 translation of The Screens? No. I am very fond of Brenton, but I think he is a dry writer. Howard Barker would have been the ideal choice. The Genet season seemed a very brave thing to do. Thatcher was in her prime and the country had just started on its rampant anti-European kick, which is still prevalent today. The Genet season was certainly an act of defiance, an attempt at creative programming. We were trying to bring to life all the things that Thatcher was trying to destroy. Genet seemed perfect for that—he’s gay, political and foreign. I think a lot of English people underestimate the damage that was done by Thatcher. Not just to plays, but to the audiences for those plays. It’s desperate in London at the moment. Look what’s happened to Rudkin, Bond and Barker. Nobody will put their work on. A final question. What do you think Genet’s influence has been on British theatre? In Britain, I would say his influence has been important, but indirect. It has mostly come through directors who came into contact with Genet in the 1960s. Peter Brook is key. Brook was the one who really started the interest in Genet with his production in Paris and then with his experiments at the Donmar with The Screens. British directors in the 1960s became intrigued by Genet’s work, and then, when they went to Shakespeare and the classics, they carried those concepts with them. Because they had looked at Genet, they started to explore the relationship between sex, politics, power and corruption in classic English plays. I’m thinking here, in particular, of the work done at the RSC in the 1970s and early 1980s. In my opinion, that’s where Genet’s influence on British theatre lies—in the way directors apply his ideas and concepts to other texts.




Illustration 6 Actors in rehearsal for The Balcony, Barbican Theatre, London, 1987. Terry Hands (dir.).


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Illustration 7 The Court Envoy addresses the Queen and the Three Figures in The Balcony, London, 1987. Terry Hands (dir.).



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Illustration 8 Helen Mirren as the Horse and Philip Locks as the General in Tableau Three of The Balcony, Aldwych Theatre, 1971. Terry Hands (dir.).


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Colin Chambers is a playwright, critic and academic. His many publications include The Story of Unity Theatre (1989), Margaret Ramsay: Play Agent (1997) and Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company (2004). He was Literary Manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1981 and 1997 and helped to organize the Genet season at the RSC in 1987. This text is a companion piece to the interview with Terry Hands.

Carl Lavery:

Colin Chambers:

What was the rationale for the RSC’s Genet season in 1987? Was it because Genet had died in 1986 and there was a need for a retrospective? No, not really. To answer that, you have to go into the history of the RSC in the 1980s. Terry Hands had been the joint artistic director of the company with Trevor Nunn for about a decade. When Nunn left in 1986, Hands was in sole charge for the first time, and, quite naturally, wanted to put his stamp on the contemporary side of the RSC’s work. Hands had a great affinity with French theatre. He had directed at the Comédie Française, received the Légion d’honneur for his work there, and was generally very pro-European in outlook. Also, Hands’ aesthetics are very close to Genet’s. Like Genet, he’s interested in theatre that deals with politics in a mythical and non-naturalistic way. You can see that aspect of his work in his productions of Shakespeare. The Genet season owed more to Hands’ personal agenda than to the Zeitgeist. In fact, a lot of people at the RSC were against the


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idea. Somehow, in the late 1980s, putting on all of Genet’s plays didn’t quite seem the right thing to do. In an interview with Plays and Players in 1987, Terry Hands offers an alternative view. He argues that Genet predates the whole notion of identity politics that took off in the 1980s. According to him, the Genet season was an attempt at reinventing Genet as a political playwright, as someone who contested the society of the spectacle. For Hands, Genet shows that politics is a performance, a piece of theatre. I’ve never heard Hands articulate it like that. He’s absolutely right, of course. Genet is the key link between postmodernism and political theatre. He’s the first post-Brechtian playwright, the first dramatist to deal with politics in a mediatized world. And if you look at the history of the RSC in the 1960s, there’s a sense that Peter Brook was trying to explore similar territory with his marriage of Brecht and Artaud in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade and, of course, in his experiments with the opening scenes of The Screens during the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season at the Donmar in 1964. When Brook was refused permission by the censor to stage The Screens in Britain, he went off to explore other projects. As a result, British theatre lost interest in Genet. Apart from The Maids, which chimed with gay politics, Genet’s really important political plays have been ignored in Britain. So, from that point of view, I fully endorse Hands’ comments in the interview you mentioned. He was onto something there. It’s strange that the British have ignored plays like The Blacks and The Screens for so long. In the 1970s, Genet was a relatively well-known figure in the English-speaking world. Lindsey Kemp’s dance piece Flowers was successful, Bowie recorded the song Gene Genie, and he was being mentioned all the time by underground artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith and Derek Jarman. Do you think the British reject Genet’s mature work because it’s simply too difficult, too avant-garde? Yes, absolutely. In Britain, there’s a strong resistance to politically experimental theatre. This same prejudice explains our resistance to Brecht. But it’s doubled here because Brecht is an ideological playwright. Only a couple of Brecht’s plays—Mother Courage and The Caucasian Chalk Circle—have entered the British canon. We couldn’t really avoid those, could we? But what about plays like The Mother, Saint Joan of


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the Stockyards and Simone Machard? We’ve totally ignored them in the mainstream theatre. It’s the same with Genet. For the British, it seems easier to deal with Genet as a gay playwright than as a political playwright. It’s the same with his novels. No one reads Prisoner of Love, his work about the Palestinians. That’s symptomatic of the British attitude towards political art. We just can’t cope with that side of things. Brecht and Genet are intellectual playwrights—they use theatre to unmask power structures in a non-naturalistic way. They have a lot in common in that respect. I agree. But there’s a key difference isn’t there? Genet, like Artaud, is interested in the sacred. He speaks of an affective theatre, a theatre that would shatter the subject. Genet’s theatre fuses Artaud and Brecht in what I think is an almost impossible dramaturgy. Yes, I can see that. That’s actually part of the problem with Genet’s theatre—the very thing that troubled Brook, I think. When you read Genet’s texts, it’s as if they were written by somebody who has no interest in actual theatre practice. That’s why Genet and Artaud have so much in common. Their writing for the theatre is enormously imaginative and experimental, but virtually impossible to stage. Genet is a visionary—he’s not interested in the grubby side of theatre, like actually putting on the show. That’s another reason why the British don’t like him. He makes too many demands. In this interview, we’ve tended to stress Genet’s lack of impact on the British stage. But Terry Hands, in the interview in Plays and Players that I mentioned earlier, talked about his influence on playwrights like David Rudkin and Howard Barker. Again, I agree with him. And you could probably add Edward Bond to that list, though I don’t know if consciously. The stoning scene in Saved is very Genetian. Like Genet, Bond is an exile in his own country, someone who has no respect for the acting establishment in Britain. He wants to change the vocabulary of theatre and directs his own plays, without being able to get the best out of actors. I’ve never actually talked to Howard Barker about Genet’s influence on his work, but I can certainly see what Hands is getting at. It also throws more light on Hands’ decision to look at Genet. Just before Trevor Nunn left in 1986, the RSC


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did a trilogy of Barker plays. They were excellent. Barker’s The Castle is still one of the best things I’ve seen in the theatre. The link between David Rudkin and Genet is even more obvious. Rudkin was a great fan and produced two excellent translations of Deathwatch and The Maids for the RSC Genet season. They really are much better than the terrible Frechtman translations. That was part of the original plan, actually. To publish a new volume of translations which would have appeared in print as the RSC Genet. Can I ask you about what happened to Wole Soyinka’s translation? We commissioned him to translate The Blacks for a production that he was going to direct himself. Initially, he was enthusiastic about the project. He produced a translated version of the play which arrived on time, and then he came to London to prepare for casting, which is where the problems started. I’d arranged a trip around the Barbican for him, and after he finished the tour, he turned to me and said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t work in this set-up. It’s not for me’. What did he mean by that? Well, Soyinka is very much his own man, and he was aware that the pre-existing structures of the RSC would not have allowed him the space he needed to stage the play according to his own plans. But just to clarify things: he’d already submitted the translation? Oh yes, we had the translation. So the next step was to find another director. That proved disastrous for a number of reasons, which I’d rather not go into here. I remember one of the big issues at the time concerned what type of Genet season it was going to be. Soyinka had produced an interpretation of the play, not a translation. Soyinka, for instance, had set the play in the Caribbean, and added a new beginning. Obviously, it was no longer Genet’s original play. Hands took the view—and I don’t know if this was his genuine opinion or simply an attempt to adjust to Soyinka dropping out—that we had to remain faithful to Genet’s texts. So the translation sat on the shelves at the RSC gathering dust until it was thrown out during a clean-up, after I’d left. Madness. The situation with The Blacks and the relatively cool commercial and critical response to The Balcony took the


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wind out of our sails. We ended up abandoning both The Blacks and The Screens, which Hands had planned to direct and stage outside in the courtyard of the Barbican. How long was the season originally planned to last? Originally one year, but the whole thing fell apart, and we ended up with The Balcony on its own in July 1987, followed by a double bill of The Maids and Deathwatch at the Pit in October 1987. So there was no real season as such. I think it would have been much better if we had done all the plays over two years. At least that way, there would have been a full Genet cycle at the RSC. It seems that the failure of the Genet season was a pivotal moment in the history of the RSC and, indeed, for British theatre in general. It was. Instead of being an innovative theatrical institution that commissioned new writing and took political risks, the RSC became just another entertainment corporation. Although I don’t link it directly to the Genet season in my book Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company, I do feel that we lost an opportunity to renew the company. Staging Genet’s political plays and retranslating his work is exactly what the RSC should have been—and still should be—doing.


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Richard Schechner is editor of TDR: The Drama Review: The Journal of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of Arts, New York University. His publications include Performance Theory (1988), The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (1993) and Performance Studies: An Introduction (2002, 2nd edition, 2006). In addition to his academic work, Schechner has had a long career as a theatre director. In this interview, he talks about his environmental staging of The Balcony (1979/80), a production which marked the end of The Performance Group, a company he founded in New York in the late 1960s. Carl Lavery:

How central has Genet been to the development of your career? You’ve always been interested in performance and performativity and Genet is the master of these, isn’t he? Richard Schechner: I was fascinated by Genet’s theatre long before I became interested in performance theory. I put on a production of The Maids at Tulane University in 1963. I really started to get interested in Genet when I was in Paris researching my PhD thesis on Ionesco in the early 1960s. Bernard Frechtman, Genet’s translator, gave me a signed copy of his translation of The Balcony when I was there—when he was, I think, trying to seduce me. That was my entrée into Genet’s world. C. L.: What fascinates you about Genet? R. S.: The way he deals with identity slippage. In Pirandello, you have a rational approach to the


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slipperiness of performing identity. You always know who’s playing and who’s being played. The theatrical frame remains undisturbed. In Genet’s theatre, the performance of identity is much more intense and radical. In The Balcony and The Blacks, it’s impossible to pin down the characters. They are all in the process of desiring to be somebody else and never really achieving that through their playing. They never manage to leave themselves behind. The spectator is baffled by that. Either s/he starts to become aware of the frame (the fact that identity in these plays is a performance) or to doubt the solidity of the frame altogether (the fact that this might not be a play at all). When Irma makes her final speech in The Balcony—that the spectators should go out in the streets or go home, where things are more false than in the theatre—she’s implying, like Erving Goffman does, that everyday life is theatricalized and performed. And more: that it is in the theatre that ‘solidity’, such as it is, can be found in the act of institutionalizing the symbolic. This changes the meaning of theatre. We no longer go to the theatre to see ourselves stripped bare. Rather, we go to see ourselves as performers, to observe the play of theatrical frames. C. L.: It’s interesting that you mention Goffman. Genet seems to have more in common with someone like Judith Butler. R. S.: You’re probably right. Where Goffman sees the world as a stage where an actor enters, exits and then goes home, Butler stresses the never-ending aspects of performance. For her, there is no offstage area, identity itself is a performance. Performance is what produces you, and that certainly describes what’s happening in The Balcony. C. L.: Doesn’t that aspect of Genet’s work connect with your own interests in performativity and performance? R. S.: I hadn’t thought of that before. But I certainly did set out to explore various aspects of performativity in my production of The Balcony. In my version, Irma is broke and she creates the whole illusion of a revolution with basic sound effects from a tape recorder and photographs from a slide projector, both of which are on display for the audience. After all, if you take into account what Irma charges, her whorehouse is not fancy. What’s fancy is the way she stimulates the imaginations of her clients—and arouses the ‘creativity’ of the Police Chief, her (his) lover. I say ‘his’ because in my production, Irma is performed


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by Ron Vawter, and the Police Chief by Steven Borst—two out gay men. And in my production, the whole revolution is a performance: it’s something that goes on in the heads of the clients, a fantasy. They create the revolution and sustain it. But at the end, like Viktor Frankenstein’s monster, the revolution becomes real—real enough, that is, to give Roger reason to castrate himself in order to ‘approach’ becoming the Police Chief. The Balcony’s revolution is just like theatre; it is theatre—something turning in on itself. A ‘whirligig’ as Sartre once commented regarding Genet. Directors who represent the revolution as something that really happens outside the brothel have misunderstood the play. You have to remember that the brothel is a ‘house of illusions’—it allows people to act out their deepest desires and, of course, to be affected by these performances. C. L.: Your staging of the brothel raises another issue. Do we have to betray Genet to create a successful production of his plays? You seem to suggest this in your article, ‘Genet’s The Balcony: A 1981 Perspective on a 1979/80 Production’ where you claim—and I think you’re right—that there is a problem with the dramaturgy of the play, and that you had to find a solution to this. R. S.: My history as a director has been to ignore the playwright’s intentions. I don’t study them very much. In fact, I am not interested in them. If the playwright wants it done in a certain way, then let the playwright direct it. I always begin by erasing all stage directions, and I never read introductions. It’s probably my own arrogance, but I think of the production as a unique and original art work. The text isn’t the primary thing for me. So to answer your question, I didn’t betray Genet because betrayal presupposes a relationship of trust. Since I am never in a relationship of trust with writers, I am not able to betray them. C. L.: The reason why I asked you about betrayal is that the most successful productions of Genet’s work have been achieved by directors, like Victor García and Rainer Fassbinder, who have used the script as a starting point for something else. R. S.: I can’t comment on these productions. I wasn’t involved in them. What I will say, however, is that my starting point, as we discussed earlier, was performance. Genet is a gay male. I wanted queerness to be at the centre of the production. I cast


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Irma as a man. Ron Vawter, one of the best actor-queens I have ever known, played the role. At the very start of the play, Ron enters the stage dressed in blue jeans, and the first thing he does is to strip naked. Then he puts on women’s underwear and a silk robe. It took him virtually the whole play to get fully dressed. In each scene, he put on something else—makeup, a wig, a necklace—until he finally became the Queen in the balcony scene. Steve Borst, another gay member of the Performance Group, played the Chief of Police. When they had their fight in the middle of the play, the Chief of Police tore off Irma’s wig and unmasked her as a man. The performance of gender and sexuality were central to the production. Both the General and the Judge were played by women (Nancy Reilly and Saskia Hegt). So you get this very confused, anarchic scenario where men are in love with men dressed as women and women dressed as men screw women dressed as whores. To a certain extent, you could say that this is a betrayal of Genet’s play. None of it is in the original text, but it all is, however, in the nature of the play. If I were to stage the play again, I’d go even further in the direction of what you call betrayal. I’d have one of the whores be a she-male. I’d get the actors to whisper in the ears of the spectators. ‘Let’s get out of here and do whatever you want …’. Offer them whatever the spectator and the actor agreed on in the basement of the theatre. I actually intended to do that in the building next door to the Performing Garage, a space we had access to. I was going to call the club ‘De-basement’, but it never happened. I liked the idea very much. It certainly fits in with Irma’s speech at the end of the play where she erases the distinction between life and performance. The spectators would be lost. There would be a kind of infinite regress where you would leave the theatre expecting to go to another show. I wish we had done that. It would have underlined the whole fantasy aspect, too. C. L.: In your article, you mention wanting to do the play again. You felt that tensions within the Performance Group towards the end of the 1970s had marred the production. R. S.: If I were to do it again, I’d certainly want to deconstruct the play even more and also emphasize the environmentalism of it. In my production, the brothel was a place with many rooms, and the audience could move around the theatre to


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see the play. There was no single stage. The closest to that was Irma’s room, which sat on rails concealing a long pit—the Police Chief’s mausoleum. For the final scene, Irma’s room slides across the theatre opening the mausoleum. To see inside it, the whole audience has to gather around its edges. If I did it today, I’d probably run the first three scenes of the play simultaneously, so that the audience had to choose which one to watch. That would make it much more like a brothel and also speed the whole thing up. Or maybe run those scenes a couple of times—with clients but not whores shifting rooms. C. L.: Did Genet ever get an inkling of what you were doing with his play? R. S.: No, I don’t think he knew who I was. C. L.: That’s a shame because I think he would have been interested in your environmental approach to the play. There’s something in Genet that’s always trying to escape the confining parameters of the stage. R. S.: It’s certainly in his dramaturgy, but I’m not sure it’s in his imagination as a playwright. It’s up to the director, the designers, and the actors to bring that side of things to the fore. C. L.: How do actors respond to the performativity of Genet’s work? R. S.: In Genet’s world, success is about crossing the boundary from the real to the ideal. You have to be able to play the role, to be an actor. And that necessitates a very special rehearsal process. When I directed The Maids—and I think I sent you an email about this—I planned to change the roles of the actresses four weeks into rehearsal. I wanted the actress who ultimately played Claire to really understand what playing Madame was like. So I cast that actress as Madame. Then, after weeks of rehearsing, I told her she was really playing Claire. The actress who thought she was playing Claire ended up playing Solange. The actress who thought she was playing Solange played Madame. Everybody was mad at me. They’d given up their time, learnt their lines and developed their characters, and now they were told to do something else. They didn’t know who they were anymore. I thought that was very Genet. And they did know how to play all the characters. In other words, they knew, intimately, how to cross the barriers of consciousness and become the ideal. That type of experience is critical for acting in The Maids. In the play, Solange and Clare are always trying on identities and getting lost in them.




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C. L.: Do you think that an actor involved in a Genet play needs a rehearsal process like this? R. S.: Totally. Genet is playing with identity. He wants to destabilize it. All of his plays, with the exception of The Screens, share that concern. For him, identity is more of a vector than a homebase. The Self is something where forces momentarily meet. When other forces come into play, you become someone else. If the whole point about western drama from Sophocles to Ibsen is to ‘know thyself’, then Genet takes theatre in a new direction. He shows you that you are not who you thought you were. Or you are not anchored. There is no way to know thyself because the Self is floating. Actors aren’t used to this process. Normally, they represent a fixed character, someone with definable attributes and traits. So to get them to play plastic or fluid characters, you have to challenge their identity, to make them experience what R. D. Laing called ‘the divided self’. Genet is the playwright par excellence of that. C. L.: And how does this make the actors feel? R. S.: Many of them don’t like it. It’s very dangerous. You’re asking them to get in touch with a part of their personhood that’s in question anyway. But to really perform Genet, actors need to explore that territory. They need to confront fantasies and experiences that they would normally repress and to explore unconscious influences that have nevertheless shaped them. In the rehearsals for The Balcony, I only selected actors who were willing to do that. When Nancy Reilly, who played the General, auditioned for the role, she turned up wearing military boots and a flight jacket, and marched up and down the stage. The jacket belonged to her father, who, it turns out, was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. He’d always wanted a boy who would go to war and become a high-ranking officer. In rehearsals, it emerged that Nancy used to stand in the closet and smell the uniforms. She wanted to be a boy to please her father. She used that fantasy in preparing for her role. For the production, she shaved her head and flattened her breasts with tape. In Nancy’s case, the play became a text for exploring her own fantasies. She understood the play at a deep level and was great in it. C. L.: That certainly makes sense. In ‘Letters to Roger Blin’, Genet says that actors need to be androgynous. He compares them to Tiresias.


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Like every great writer and director, Genet is interested in getting the actor into that strange space where the self becomes the notself and where social reality is replaced by something more mysterious and imaginative. At any rate, that’s what happens in The Blacks and The Balcony. It’s different in The Screens. In that play, he creates a total, poetic world, where things seem to blossom on their own. It’s the opposite of Beckett. Beckett is a single-stroke calligrapher, while Genet is a Bosch or Brueghel. There’s a lot going on in his plays. C. L.: In your article about The Balcony, you talk about your ambivalence towards the politics of the play. Could you explain that? R. S.: I’d been involved in the protests of the 1960s and still think of myself as politically progressive, if not radical. Now, The Balcony denies radical politics. From a revolutionary viewpoint, it’s a very depressing and bitter play. Order is re-established and Roger castrates himself. I wanted to intensify that bleakness by showing how the revolution of the 1960s—the revolution of my generation—was also a failure, just another sham performance. Instead of re-politicizing the play, I was actually depoliticizing it even further. C. L.: Do you see The Blacks and The Screens as bleak plays too? R. S.: No. The Screens and The Blacks are about the vengeance of the Third World and its ultimate triumph. As a white European, it’s very self-destructive to believe in those plays because they show how western culture deserves to be crushed. But if you want to look at the progress of the world as a whole, then they’re hopeful. C. L.: Do you think part of the problem we have in understanding Genet’s work is due to his attempt to articulate what we might call a sacred politics? R. S.: I don’t find Genet to be a sacred playwright at all. He might be interested in unveiling social norms and cultural archetypes, but I don’t see how the concept of the sacred applies to that. C. L.: I was thinking about his essay ‘That Strange Word …’, where he suggests, like Artaud, that theatre ought to fulfil a sacred and mythical function. R. S.: Maybe. But that means you’re privileging the author’s intentions. For me, they are just another opinion. They don’t really mean anything more than that. We haven’t the slightest idea what Zeami, Shakespeare or Euripides thought about their plays. All we have is the work. They didn’t write prefaces.


R. S.:


Carl Lavery

C. L.:

R. S.:

C. L.:

R. S.:

C. L.:

R. S.: C. L.: R. S.:

C. L.:

R. S.:

Zeami did write a lot about how to perform, but not specifically how to perform any play of his. For that kind of instruction, you have to go to George Bernard Shaw. What about a play like The Blacks, where social and political liberation is dependent upon the ritual slaughter of a ‘white woman’? Yes, but ritual and sacred are very different things. Almost all sacred things are ritual, but many things that are ritual are not sacred. But Genet is trying to create rituals in a strong sense. In The Blacks, the whole value-system of the profane world is suspended. We come to terms with the abject, with what society cannot deal with. That’s what The Screens is all about, too. The Blacks is more ceremonial than his other plays, but that’s due to Genet’s own mystification of what it means to be a Black. It’s part of his love affair with Negritude. For me, the sacred is an appeal to a transcendent being or set of beings. You can’t apply the word to everything. I wasn’t intending to. I use ‘sacred’ in the way that someone like Georges Bataille or Julia Kristeva might use it. That’s to say, as an experience that negates the social world and its values. So the sacred is to do with sex, violence, and death, with everything, in other words, that the everyday world denies and represses. That’s the sacred by analogy. It’s hard for me to extend things into realms where I don’t feel they belong except by analogy. A last question, then. What do you think Genet’s influence has been on the development of the American avant-garde? His plays aren’t performed that much anymore—at least not in New York. The big player from that generation is Beckett. People remember Genet more as a novelist and, to some extent, as a gay activist, rather than as a playwright. What about his influence on The Living Theatre, Mabou Mines, JoAnne Akalatis, and Peter Sellars? They’ve all staged his work. And so have you. Well, he’s a great playwright. There’s no doubt about that. What I will say is this: he’s been unfairly forgotten. He’s up there with the best of the Modernists, with Ibsen, Pirandello and Brecht.


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Illustration 9 View of the performance space in The Balcony, at the Performing Garage, The, New York, 1979/80. Richard Schechner (dir.).


Illustration 10 Ron Vawter dressed as Irma in The Balcony, at the Performing Garage, The, New York, 1979/80. Richard Schechner (dir.).


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20 Ralph Yarrow

During the last few years, I have directed the following plays by Jean Genet: The Maids (2001–03), The Balcony (1999) and The Screens (2004).1 In this essay, I want to reflect on some of the practices used in these productions and to ask what kinds of directing and acting models they suggest. As Richard Schechner points out in Chapter 19 of this collection, putting on a Genet play is particularly difficult for directors, actors and audiences, all of whom have some tendency to look for the comfort of the familiar, but who are often prepared to move beyond it and put their image on the line. Genet specifically demands that actors (in The Maids) ‘play furtively’ (1976, p. 9), or (in The Balcony) seem ‘always to be suspect’ (1956, p. 7).2 What may be needed, as I have argued in the case of Beckett, is ‘to begin to work with “difficult” processes such as absence, loss, or sacrifice of the psychological (egoic, charismatic) or physical (corporeal) qualities that appear to constitute the performer as self or agent’ (Yarrow, 2001, p. 76). This is not out of line with the kinds of demands which actor training has incorporated in the latter half of the twentieth century, sometimes as a result of drawing on non-western models like Noh; and it recognizes a need to extend the range of the ‘self ‘(whilst rendering that term itself a site of ambiguity) in and as performance. Doing this is not just a kind of exotic experimentation; it has profound political and ethical consequences for the way we conceive and practise the sense of who/what/where we are.


More Holes Than Blanket: Rehearsal Process as Political Process in Genet’s Theatre

Rehearsal processes for The Maids In The Maids, the performers can never be allowed to feel ontologically comfortable. The characters they are playing are attempting to ‘undefine’, 223


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rather than to define themselves. Because the identity of the maids is conditioned by Madame, they believe their only way out is to become evil, to destroy their own devalued being as ‘good (women)/maids’, and also to destroy she who determines it: Madame, and all that composes her world. Madame, whatever her natural and/or cultural genders, is constructed as imitation and appearance, both in order to dominate by virtue of her status and to signal an ambiguity of role and function. In both senses, she must always be more ‘Madame’ than anyone else could achieve; she must constantly transcend herself in order to maintain her image and position, and in so doing achieve a state of continuous ambivalence. In terms of the play’s action, she succeeds: ‘Madame escapes herself ‘ (Genet, 1976, p. 75). Conversely, in their attempt to egg each other on to entrap and kill her, Claire and Solange take it in turns to become more Madame than Madame, pushing themselves beyond the behavioural and linguistic boundaries of their status as maids. All three need to produce themselves, sensing the threat of their own nullity. This fear generates banal/familiar stereotypes to cling to, along with the sense that they only exist when being watched or confirmed by others. The maids especially always feel—Kafka-like—guilty for/in being. For them, role is a refuge from the anguish of existence. The anxiety of the maids has important parallels with what the French actor-trainer Jacques Lecoq calls ‘the void’, the fear that engulfs every actor when faced with the prospect of having to produce himself/herself from and with nothing (Frost and Yarrow, 1990). However, where the maids are horrified by this emptiness and recoil from it, many teachers of acting deliberately create exercises that would allow actors to experience this anxious sense of self-loss or slippage of identity (Barker, 1977; Johnstone, 1981; Boal, 1992; Callery, 2001). For actors, emptiness is not something to repress; on the contrary, it provides them with the possibility of producing themselves anew, of experiencing the joy of becoming other. This is important within the context of this essay: it suggests that certain forms of actor training allow privileged access to the deconstruction of role and identity which features so prominently in much postcolonial and post-structuralist debate. The improvisatory acting techniques developed by Lecoq and Keith Johnstone are particularly important here, for they involve locating and mediating the kind of no-place condition of being which is articulated by Genet in his writings on politics and theatre. Playing Genet, then, may be the equivalent of a performative psychophysiology of deconstruction. Among instructions to actors arising from this, the main one in the case of the production mentioned at the beginning of this essay is


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perhaps Philippe Gaulier’s goading to ‘play, play, play’.3 If there is, for the characters in The Maids, a (Stanislavskian) ‘natural’ condition, it is paradoxically based on play, in the sense of continuous uncertainty about being. One’s being is only that which one plays. Covering up anxiety means pushing oneself even harder to perform, to be more outrageous, more fully realized (in words, gestures, costume) than others. But it is also important to play the changes of role: Claire as Madame, Solange as Claire, Solange as Madame, Claire as Solange, and then finally Claire re-adopting the Madame role near the end of the play as a strategy for allowing her sister Solange to find the strength to bring Claire/Madame the poisoned tea. ‘We’ve got to start the play again from where we stopped’, even if (or even more so because) ‘it’s a dangerous game’ (Genet, 1965, p. 20). It is dangerous because it is a game in which one puts one’s current state of being continuously into play, at risk, entering and disclosing the understanding that we are no more than act(or)s of passage. Some exercises and tactics I have used in rehearsal and performance to move performers towards materializing, living with, these kinds of insecure condition are: ●

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destabilizing/disorienting: keeping up frequent and staccato movements, having to begin again from zero or from anywhere, working with disordered hair and costume; getting actors to play against the clock, against objects, against themselves and their own fatigue,4 setting up obstacles, creating physical obstructions and difficulties; swapping roles/lines: playing each other’s roles, mirroring each other—especially the two maids. There is also a need for Madame to mirror them mirroring her, and so on;5 dislocating ‘the ceremony’ (ibid., p. 14) in the play and drawing attention to the theatricality of the action (for example, when ‘Claire’, played by Solange, slaps ‘Madame’, played by Claire); working in an atmosphere of oppression and enclosure; and establishing distinct and different rhythms between and within different movements in the play and shifting suddenly between modes/tones.6


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What does this do to actors? It moves them towards internalizing and incorporating some of the impulses, emotions and tensions necessary to make available the experience of the play as something that is lived viscerally rather than considered analytically. It makes them continually


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aware of their own playing and of their reflection in each other. For the audience, it incites an awareness of the inescapable complicity of its role in constructing versions or worlds, and of the inevitability of inhabiting oppressor/victim roles in that process. Always, to us, the performers play a doubled and tripled jeu. For the maids, the desire to imitate Madame only enmeshes them further in the cycle of violence. At the end of the play, Claire’s death merely serves to confirm the status quo. Nothing has changed; Madame remains in power. The performance is pure repetition. Nevertheless the play incarnates a mode of continual ambiguity, of transition between roles, genders, frames and possible outcomes. Genet’s underlying intuition, rendered more fully in his subsequent plays, is that the ambiguity he so deliberately cultivated in his personal life is the only possible strategy of resistance in a world in which fettered minds are revealed in the binaries of oppositional moral posturing.

Rehearsal processes for The Balcony Although there is clearly a personal politics at work in The Maids, The Balcony locates its negotiation of image and reflection in a more public zone. Nowadays, politicians rarely do anything without consulting an image consultant. They, like the clients of ‘Le Grand Balcon’, erect a simulacrum, an unimpeachable ideal self. Fifty years ago, Genet perceived the distinction between image and function, and the inherent escalation of self-regard. Whores and actors, although they may, like Arthur, Irma’s subservient pimp, be fatally seduced by their own images too, acknowledge their illusory and equivocal status. They play, and they know that they play; and the theatricality of their playing enacts the truth that we are only things that play, roles that flicker across the void which underlies and undermines our pretensions. The truth in The Balcony is not in the images constructed inside or outside the brothel; it is in the revelation of their falsity. As a stage on the way from The Maids to The Screens, the play engages the void subtending public and private selves and explodes the sumptuously fake and supremely theatrical decors of the brothel which try to legitimize and protect those tenuous constructs. Processes, structures and modes of working on the play in order to instigate this process of engagement and explosion included: ●


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locating the action in a series of theatrical sets in which roles and things are struggling to define and perpetuate themselves. The


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performers assembled and disassembled the sets themselves and improvized from whatever objects were to hand. In the initial tableau sequences, the performers struggled to put on and take off elaborate costumes, while carrying their own props; transforming events in the play into a ‘dead zone’ via real and imaginary gunshots and explosions. Some shots were ‘live’ blanks fired just offstage; others were rendered as deliberately ‘artificial’ sound effects via the loud speaker system; allowing the stage and audience spaces to interpenetrate. The Chantal/Roger dialogue in Tableau Six entwined the actors around the safety-railings in the auditorium; emphasizing the over-the-top theatricality of a social order which enacts its own fragility through increasingly absurd rituals. In rehearsal, the actors experimented with games and exercises of mirroring, explored the limits of their vocal range, and played with stylized gestures; constantly shifting the space in which the play takes place through the use of balconies, trapdoors, offstage voices and recorded text; cultivating an Ortonesque acting style that is used to deflate the pretensions of the Chief of Police and Roger. Their investment in the absolute is thereby revealed as both ludicrous and menacing; allowing the text to resonate as sudden unexpected image, as vocal explosion, as paradox and double entendre, as counterpoint in tone and register to what ‘character’ or ‘situation’ might lead one to expect. In The Balcony, the physicality of the language always threatens to explode the tidiness of symbolic meaning. The actors exploited this by playing with the text as onomatopoeia, as alliterative or rhyming patterns, as magnificent and absurd rhetorical confections (for example, the Bishop when commenting on his image in the mirror as he dons his vestments); and using contrasting acting styles and frames of reference. The brothel clients and the Chief of Police espouse a kind of Stanislavskian through-line, an intention. They have a definite objective and invest real emotion in attempting to achieve their desires. In other words, they are believable, realistic. However, the presence of three ‘framing’ characters, Irma, Carmen and the Envoy, along with many of the processes outlined above, combine to undermine or deconstruct their desire for linearity. The framing characters highlight the artificial and impossible nature of any desire for authenticity and truth on the stage.



The aim of this work was to unsettle actors and audience, to make things difficult, to disallow any identification (except ironical) between


Ralph Yarrow

actor and character. To generate this discomfort, actors have to experience it directly and physically themselves. Whereas ‘Claire’ and ‘Solange’ are relatively coherent entities to perform, character in The Balcony is much more of an ad hoc composition. Actors are prevented from finding a psychological ground for their character; rather, they are invited to play or inhabit empty vessels. To do this, they have to be sensitive to character as a mere nexus of signs and symbols. The Balcony is a real bal des cons in at least two senses:7 ideological and idealized pretensions are caricatured in a kind of Bakhtinian revelry. But here, as in The Blacks, the new order seems likely to replicate the old, although Irma’s final admonition that things ‘at home’ will be no different from life in the theatre, enjoins the audience at least to be aware of the prevalence of such a situation. The Screens, on the other hand, offers an alternative scenario, and thus requires an encounter with further levels of deconstructive acting.

Rehearsal processes for The Screens Structurally more complex than the preceding plays, The Screens materializes a variety of intercutting narratives: those of Saïd/Mother/Leïla; colonialists, oppressors and oppressed; war and revolt; and the journey to Death. These narratives are produced on a large number of levels and areas, partly by the operation of screens. However, these spaces are never fixed, but always in process, always shifting, frequently double or triple. They reflect the following decors and spaces, which also interpenetrate or facilitate commentary on each other: luxury zones (brothel, Blankensee house, environments for the Europeans); minimal domestic zones (village, Arab houses); transitional zones (desert, the spaces occupied by soldiers, legionnaires and combatants, the no-man’s land between living and dying). The experience generated in and by these spaces is mediated vocally and physically through a series of levels and tones: that of the oppressors; that of the oppressed; that of transition, miscegenation, hiatus and hesitation. Its complexity is further signalled by the presence of ‘real’ objects, illusory representations (drawings on screens, ‘false’ objects) and the theatres of the colonialists and brothel. The interaction of all these factors institutes a process of continual juxtaposition, relativization and shifting focus; everything is always provisional, never defined or set. The cast list has 98 characters. Roger Blin (April 1966) used 45 actors; Patrice Chéreau (September, 1983): 39;


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Marcel Maréchal (November 1991): 24; Bernard Bloch (January 2001): 15; Frédéric Fisbach (May 2002) 3, plus puppets. My production made substantial cuts in text and roles, but still required 20 to 25 performers to cover around 75 parts. So in all cases, performing, as well as receiving, is a process of continual transposition, transformation and transubstantiation. Each actor has to be many bodies, voices and potentialities. Identity for performers is plural; there is no single or even easily reducible trajectory or thematic solution. The play thus seems to require the following: ● ●

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learning how to live abjection (being in-between); constructing theatre as a means of exposing the simulacrum of the world; living the experience that transformation of the world comes not through resistance or revolution, but through the negation of the desire to reflect the world of the oppressors, by refusing their mode of being; celebrating the link between theatre and death, recognizing the need to pass through death in order to unravel the illusions of power; and understanding how to use débâcle as a survival tactic.

Taken together with the procedures of the earlier plays, what this seems to suggest is something I call interstitial acting (where ‘acting’ also implies a way of thinking and thus of being, and hence is at least potentially applicable to audience as well as performers). Interstitial acting requires, is produced from and produces interstitial being. I am most freely and fully myself when I am in the gaps of being (as defined socially, politically, existentially or metaphysically). From here, perhaps, I may speak before that which speaks for me. That is important, because interstitial being is the only way to escape from the reification of Self as image, as idealization, as fixity and fixation, from the binary mode of the colonialist/fascist mind-set. Genet’s support for the oppressed and disenfranchized is expressed here in the requirement, translated through all modalities of theatre in The Screens, to learn to navigate, to operate, in-betweenness, to live outside your own skin. John Emigh calls it ‘ontological acrobatics’ (1996, p. 29); I propose (polypropensity). Actors from Copeau to Lecoq have been learning to access this; and not simply for technical or narcissistic reasons. We are talking about an ethical necessity in a world in which not to accommodate the Other in oneself is to participate in ethnic cleansing. Genet understands it this way. That is why The Screens is so burningly relevant today, and why acting it requires a politics as well as a dramatics.




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It is important to ‘fail’ (pace Beckett) continuously because the risk of closure is inscribed in our texts, in our language, in our structures, in our ways of thinking. Nothing will do except to refuse actively, and to avoid repetition through erecting another simulacrum of a simulacrum.8 In The Screens, several characters move towards this with a degree of ‘volition’ (in fact, more like learning how not to desire anything conventional, like a ‘normal’ marriage or a real chicken; but that not-desiring is itself a more subtle energy of intention, which operates a kind of unravelling of the expected structures of desire, a kind of un-thinking or unmaking); whereas in The Maids and The Balcony, they all (with the exception of Irma’s final ‘non-matrixed’ injunction) are trying to ward off the void. Saïd at the end is both like Christ and quite the opposite. He disappears into the wilderness and everyone, including the Dead, awaits him in Tableau Fifteen, but typically he brings the opposite of solution or salvation. He is not even, or especially not, a song, which might turn out to be a nationalist/romantic myth-machine. Leïla has in a way already up- (or down-) staged him: she doesn’t appear at all. Blin’s belief that Saïd’s absence unbalanced the play (Genet, 2002, p. 1254) is perhaps more accurate than he purposed, and the absence itself is quite deliberate on Genet’s part. There is no closure. The blanket that Leïla takes to prison is mostly holes; she and Saïd, in their anti-picaresque journey away from all the parameters of property and propriety, learn more and more how not to be, how to inhabit the holes in any pattern of role or image. Or, as Si Slimane puts it: ‘my own image is blurred … I’m melting, I’ve melted’ (1963, p.161). Saïd urges Leïla on with ‘there’s not much more you lack’ (ibid., p. 107). Some things which, for Genet and for me, seem like useful ways of generating this kind of condition through performance include: ●

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mask-like and gaudy make-up to emphasize the process and function of theatre; mask work (based on commedia dell’ arte and/or larval masks) to shift the locus of expressivity from face to body;9 exploring the text as tone, register, pitch, poetry rather than meaning; feeling the shape of words; running metaphors together to see if a gesture or body-shape emerges; keening, chanting, ululation (as atmosphere/context, as signifier of situation and mood, as part of the sonic score);10 discovering a choreography of fragmentation, disassociation; locating sonic scores in scenes and sections; exploring their dissonance, their unexpected and disruptive function—odd kinds of laughter, percussive sounds, etc.;


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composing a world from the interaction of people and objects: sharing the rhythms and extensions, the texture and propensities of wheelbarrows and cheese-graters; developing patterns of bodies: knitters secreting huge black substances; Legionnaires, Arab soldiers, mourners as physical blocks or mobile machines; embodying people who limp or lack limbs, are blind, grope, drag themselves; and using exercises to access elements (Lecoq), atmospheres (Michael Chekhov), physical drives and energies (Laban).

Relationships to things are important in The Screens. For the actors, material objects have to be played with, becoming in the process part of their own body, transforming it in shape and function so that it forms a new entity (Leïla-cheese-grater; Saïd-Mother-suitcase). Together, they become a kind of ‘monster’, like Caliban, Trinculo and the gabardine: Self plus Other. In merging with the (‘real’) grater and the (‘imaginary’) clock, Leïla produces herself as thief, as a stage on the journey into abjection and outcastness. In Tableau One, Saïd and the Mother create a joyous, extraordinary game with the suitcase. It is empty and signals that they own nothing; but its emptiness generates a dance of creative freedom which is akin to a type of concretized Zen practice. It is a stimulus to engage with an emptiness of significance, a meeting place where Self and matter may be undone and rendered available for recreation. Such an incorporation of otherness involves a passage through an emptiness: an abandonment of the known or normal Self which owns or has a place; or a location of the contours of the material in the not quite manifest realm of the imaginary. Bodies abandon their everyday modes, transfigure themselves; Leïla crawls, emits strange sounds, squats; Kadidja and Warda ‘watch’ their own death; the Dead incorporate it, wryly and with amazement (‘that’s it!’11), or enact its grotesqueness (the Sergeant shot as he shits). They pass through themselves, as it were, to become another. Elements, locations, entities are produced from sound and movement: Saïd and Habib produce the wind with mouths and bodies in Tableau Four; the Dead create Kadidja’s flies; throughout the play actors on- or offstage produce soundscapes and images, as when the Arabs inscribe images of guerilla warfare on the blank screen in Tableau Ten or when Sir Harold’s horse Jewel manifests its presence through vocalized ‘neighs’ and ‘trots’ in Tableau Four. Space and time are dynamized, producing a sensory and tangible universe. As Leïla ‘gives birth’ to the grater and the lamp from beneath her skirts in Tableau Nine, these phenomena




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come out of actors’ bodies. Whether they belong at first to the category of ‘real’, ‘false’ or imaginary is not at issue. Genet deliberately mixes these orders up, stipulating that there should be some obviously theatrical props, some obviously real objects (the wheelbarrow, the bicycle) and others which do not exist at all or exist as images only (the horse, the flies, the clock) but are filled out by the physical work of the actors. Everything has to be remade or produced, by a process of internalization and externalization. To do so, actors have to give up any ideal self-image and become hybrid body-objects, discover what life might be like from the perspective of the Dead, turn themselves into half-characters and half-bits of the set. In our version of Tableau Six, the mourners used a combination of black umbrellas, repetitive dance movements and harsh chanting to turn themselves into a threatening or protective mass. These composites deliver odd shapes and rhythms, paralleling the juxtaposition of tone and register, invoking the sense that things are never quite ‘right’. Saïd, Leïla and the Mother journey through nowhere spaces towards a non-place or condition. They constantly pull each other up for any lapse back towards more familiar or comfortable zones. Leïla says, ‘I want you to lead me without flinching to the land of shadow and of the monster. … I want you to choose evil and always evil’ (1963, pp. 108–9). In The Screens, actors have to approach a kind of not-acting, but a very specific and physical kind, very close to the starting-from-zero point inherent in neutral mask or Lecoqian work. In particular, Genet offers Leïla no help from scenery, props or stage directions in the strange monologue of her death, which she has to realize from this absence of resources as an entry into further and further degrees of strangeness. Like much of the work described in this essay, it is a production from, or across nothing, and what is produced cannot quite recognizably be called Self any longer. Throughout the three plays, the actor’s trajectory is one which operates a process and an ethic of deconstruction: of self as actor and as person in the everyday sense of the term. If the latter is what Indians call maya, that is to say an illusion engraved on mortality, the former is an illusion engraved on an illusion. Genet’s theatre seems to require performers to find ways of living both the identification, and the melting away of these illusions as a training in locating the only possible zone of liberation.


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Notes 1. The Maids and The Balcony were performed in French. The Screens was performed in the translation by Bernard Frechtman.



I told the woman who was to play Claire that she was cast as Madame … etc. So that for several weeks, without their knowing it, the actresses prepared the roles they would pretend to play, not the roles they would finally play. (Personal email to Carl Lavery) 6. The dynamic shifts from precipitation to lassitude between the end of what might be called the opening movement of the play (the opening exchanges between Clare and Solange) and the opening cadence of the next section (when the sisters grow tired of the game and appear to lose all hope). The latter mode returns after Madame fails to drink the poisoned tea but is preceded by switches to declamation, argument, confrontation, etc. In rehearsal, these emotional states were reversed, exaggerated and intercut. 7. Editor’s note: The author is playing on the double entendre implicit in the French title of Le Balcon. In French, un bal des cons roughly translates as a ‘ball for idiots’, or, better still, ‘a ball for twats’. 8. See Blin: The Screens is a text written against the French Army, against all armies, rather than one which tries to rehabilitate the Algerians. In all his plays, Genet is clearly on the side of the oppressed. … He does not oppose good Algerians to bad French soldiers, any more than in The Blacks he opposed good Blacks to evil Whites. He denounces the obscenity of the oppressors and by a sleight of hand reflects it back on the oppressed. It is always the same story, those who betray the Cause are killed in the end. In The Blacks, a Black is killed by other Blacks in the wings. In The Screens the regrouped Arab soldiers kill the traitor Saïd on stage. What Genet denounces is the ineluctable restoration of order and the triumphalism of the revolution. (1986, p. 201) 9. For a good discussion of mask-work in acting see Lecoq (1997) and Frost and Yarrow (1990). 10. Particularly in Tableau One (choric laughter) and Tableau Six (mourning song), but also at many other junctures (night noises in Tableau Thirteen and whistling and barking in Tableau Fifteen). 11. Tableaus Fifteen and Sixteen.


2. All translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise indicated in Works cited. 3. L’Ecole Philippe Gaulier is located in London and trains actors in Lecoq-based methods. Gaulier insists that acting is more than an aesthetic process. For him, performing is a dynamic mode of existence in itself. See the publicity for the school at http://www.ecolephilippegaulier.com 4. There is of course the ring of a real alarm clock (Genet, 1965, p. 15). 5. I take it Richard Schechner was after something similar here when directing The Maids early in his career; he reports:

Works cited Barker, C. Theatre Games (London: Methuen, 1977). Blin, R. Souvenirs et Propos (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Boal, A. Games for Actors and Non-Actors (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).


Ralph Yarrow

Callery, D. Through the Body (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001). Emigh, J. Masked Performance: The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Frost, A. and R.Yarrow. Improvisation in Drama (London: Macmillan, 1990). Gaulier, P. L’Ecole Philippe Gaulier Homepage, 1 May 2005 http://www. ecolephilippegaulier.com. Genet, J. Le Balcon (Décines: L’Arbalète, 1956). —— The Screens, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). —— The Maids, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Faber and Faber, 1965). —— The Maids (Décines: L’Arbalète, 1976). —— Théâtre complet, eds. M. Corvin and A. Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). Johnstone, K. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1981). Lecoq, J. Le Corps Poétique: un enseignement de la création théâtrale (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997). Yarrow, R. ‘Theatre Degree Zero’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, ed. D. Meyer-Dinkgräfe, issue of Drama and Consciousness, 34: 2 (2001), 75–92.


234


Index Abel, Lionel, 11 abjection, 16, 72, 81–3, 108–15, 117–26, 198, 229 Adams, Lee, 110 Adorno, Theodor, 97 Agamben, Georgio, 75 AIDS, 113, 118, 122, 124–5, 176, 177, 178 Akalaitis, JoAnne, 2 Alarcón, Enrique, 146 Aldwych Theatre, 199, 207 Algeria, 5, 9, 13, 15, 52, 57–66, 89 n.4, 101–2, 103–4, 188, 198, 204, 205, 233n.8 Algerian War, 5, 9, 13, 15, 52, 57–66, 101–2, 198, 203 see also Manifesto of the 121; The Screens Almodóvar, Pedro, 144 Aloff, Mindy, 111 Alvarez, Gloria, 43 n.4, 151 n.3, 188–9 Amini, Abbas, 117 Angelou, Maya, 132–3, 135 anti-colonialism, 8–9, 31, 46–53, 62–3, 70–6, 85–9, 120–1, 198 see also Algerian War; decolonization; Negritude; The Balcony; The Blacks; The Screens anti-Semitism, 8–9, 17, 51, 69 Arias, Alfredo, 2 Aristophanes, 24 Aristotle, 28, 32 n.7 Arrabal, Fernando, 35, 144, 146, 151 n.4 Artaud, Antonin, 10, 13, 73, 77n.11, 124, 195, 209, 210, 219 Arts Theatre Club, 204 Athey, Ron, 16, 118, 122–6 Auslander, Philip, 36–7 avant-garde, 1, 4, 5, 16–17, 74, 96–9, 106, 143–51, 174–8, 209, 220 Baalbaki, Mounzer, 195 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 148–9

Baldwin, James, 134, 137 Ballet des Champs-Elysées, 161 Ballets de Roland Petit, 160 Baraka, Amiri, 139, 140 n.2 Barbican Theatre, 199, 206, 212 Barker, Howard, 17 n.4, 204–5, 210–11 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 194 Barthes, Roland, 10, 34–6, 37 Bartlett, Neil, 2, 176 Bataille, Georges, 64, 66, 220 Baudelaire, Charles, 23, 58 Baudrillard, Jean, 35, 45, 59, 60, 62–3, 66 Beck, Julian, 17 n.5 Beckett, Samuel, 12, 13, 35, 97, 181, 219–20, 223, 230 Beery, Wallace, 175 Belart, Antonio, 150 Belgrave, Cynthia, 132 Benhamou, Anne-Françoise, 41 Benjamin, Walter, 58, 62–3, 64–5 Bentaga, Abdallah, 108 Bergé, Francine, 171 Bersani, Leo, 114 Bharucha, Rustom, 3–4, 68–9 Bidgood, Jim, 175 Black American theatre movement, 132, 136 Black Panther Party, 6–7, 44, 46, 49–50, 52, 66 n.2, 73, 84, 96, 115 n.6, 131, 139, 174 Blau, Herbert, 17n.5 Blier, Bertrand, 175 Blin, Roger, 35–6, 37, 40, 42, 65, 66 n.2, 88, 95, 104 n.2, 132, 134, 143, 194, 198, 218, 228, 230 Bloch, Bernard, 229 Body art, 13, 117–26 Bond, Edward, 205 Börlin, Jean, 107 Borst, Steven, 215, 216


Numbers appearing in bold refer to illustrations

235


Index

Bourdieu, Pierre, 47 Bowie, David, 1, 178 n.3, 209 Bradby, David, 3, 9, 14–15, 16, 143, 144, 146 Bragg, Melvyn, 1 Brecht, Bertolt, 4, 11, 12, 24, 27, 34, 36, 46, 47, 68, 76, 77 n.11, 97, 185, 209–10, 220 Brenton, Howard, 203, 205 Breton, André, 171 Brocco, Peter, 185 Brook, Peter, 17 n.5, 199, 203–5, 209–10 Brown, Roscoe Lee, 132 Buendia, Gabriel Chamé, 151 Burden, Chris, 122 Bürger, Peter, 97 Burnside, Fiona, 113 Butler, Judith, 119, 163–4, 214 butoh, 109–12 Callas, Maria, 145 Cambridge, Godfrey M., 132 Campbell, Patrick, 124–5 Casal, Pau, 148–9 Casares, María, 42, 143–4, 171, 194–5 Cassavetes, John, 172, 185 Césaire, Aimé, 51–2 Chabrol, Claude, 151 Chambers, Colin, 17, 204, 208–12 Chaplin, Charlie, 175 Charrat, Janine, 160–1 Chaudhuri, Una, 75 Chekhov, Michael, 231 Chéreau, Patrice, 17 n.5, 40–2, 149, 193–4, 228 Cicaré, Daniel, 151 Civil Rights movement, 140 Clarke, Shirley, 172 Clause 28, 121–2, 176 Clurman, Harold, 135 Cocteau, Jean, 144, 161, 173 Coe, Richard, 161 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 17 n.3 Cold War, 184 collectivity, 8, 79–89 Comédie Française, 203–4, 208 commitment, 5–9, 49–53, 71–2, 76, 79, 80, 84 see also engagement

Corey, Jeff, 183, 185 Cornerstone Theatre, 2, 95–6, 151 n.3, 187–91 The Screens/Los biombos, 2, 17 n.2, 42, 95–6, 151 n.3, 187–91, 192 Cortázar, Julio, 150 Corvin, Michel, 4, 12, 14–15, 42, 69, 76 n.6, 77 n.7, 87, 89, 90 n.5 Crisp, Quentin, 176 Cuba, 71, 103 Danton, Georges Jacques, 201–2 Davis, Angela, 73 Davis, Ossie, 73, 134, 137–8, 139–40 De Beauvoir, Simone, 171 Debord, Guy, 74–6, 77 n.11 decolonization, 5–9, 50–3, 68–76, 85–9 Deconstruction, 15, 17, 35–42, 73, 76, 95, 110, 224, 232 see also Derrida; post-structuralism De Gennaro, Mara, 77 n.10 Delgado, Maria M., 12, 16 Delvaux, Paul, 161 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 35, 37, 41, 83 Descartes, René, 35 Diaghilev, Sergei, 161 Dichy, Albert, 5, 42, 69, 77 n.7 Diderot, Denis, 28 Dodson, Owen, 137 Donaghue, Walter, 203 Dort, Bernard, 34, 35 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 104 n.3 Dreyfus, Alfred, 5 Dridi, Karim, 176 Duchamp, Marcel, 110 Dumoulin, Michel, 171 Dumur, Guy, 143 Duncan, Isadora, 112 Dunham, Katherine, 71 Duras, Marguerite, 35 Durham, Scott, 83 Dux, Pierre, 203


236

East LA Skills Center, 2, 189, 190, 192 Emigh, John, 229 engagement, 4–15, 57–60, 68–70, 74–6, 79–90, 174 Espert, Nuria, 16, 143, 144–51, 154–5


Esslin, Martin, 12 Estéban, Cesarío, 152 n.11 Evans, Cerith Wyn, 176 everyday life, 13, 74, 95–104, 214 existentialism, 24, 32, 36, 50–1 see also Sartre Falk, Peter, 172, 182, 184, 185 Fancy, David, 41 Fanon, Frantz, 50–2, 70, 85–7 Farrah, Abdul, 207 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 151, 172–3, 215 Fichte, Hubert, 76 n.1 Fieni, David, 15, 16 Finburgh, Clare, 3, 5, 15, 35 Fini, Léonor, 161 Fisbach, Frédéric, 2, 229 Flaubert, Gustave, 23 Folke, Gosta, 171 Forest, Michael, 170 Foucault, Michel, 5, 35 Franco, General, 144–5, 149–50 Frankel, Gene, 132–6, 138, 142 Franko B, 16, 118, 122–6 Frechtman, Bernard, 24, 32 n.4, 38, 65, 131, 135, 182–3, 200, 204, 211, 213, 232 n.1 Fuchs, Elinor, 4, 75 Gaitet, Pascale, 2 Galindo, Pete, 188 García, Víctor, 12, 16, 17 n.5, 35, 42 n.2, 143, 144–51, 154–5, 215 Las criadas, 12, 16, 42 n.2, 143–51, 152 n.11, 154–5 Gas, Mario, 150 gender, 6, 16, 106–10, 115, 122, 124, 159–67, 170, 178, 216, 224, 226 Genet, Jean ’adame Miroir, 13, 16, 108, 159–67 ‘Avertissement’ to The Balcony, 8–9, 12 ‘Chartres Cathedral’, 80 Deathwatch, 1, 10, 26, 79, 81–3, 88, 169–70, 193, 199, 204, 211, 212 Elle, 10, 152 n.11 ‘Four Hours at Chatila’, 3 Fragments of the Artwork, 3, 160

‘From Beginning to End, a Tornado’, 171 ‘Introduction’ to Soledad Brother, 96 La Nuit venue, 167 n.6 ‘La Parade’, 176 ‘L’art est un refuge’, 77 n.7 Le Bagne, 169 Le Bleu de l’œil, 167 n.6 ‘Le Condamné à mort’, 176 Le Funambule, 83 L’Enfant criminel, 84, 167 n.3 ‘Les Maîtresses de Lénine’, 17 n.3 ‘Letter to Jean-Jacques Pauvert’, 38 ‘Letters to Roger Blin’, 104 n.2, 218 ‘May Day address, 6 Miracle of the Rose, 37, 120, 162, 163, 166, 169, 176, 177 Our Lady of the Flowers, 81, 106–14, 125, 159, 162–3, 175,177 Prisoner of Love, 9, 13, 35, 63–4, 79, 80, 84, 89, 210 Querelle de Brest, 82, 172–5 Splendid’s, 2, 3, 10, 80, 83 ‘That Strange Word …’, 10, 13, 15, 95, 98–101, 103, 104 n.2, 112, 219 The Balcony (Le Balcon), 3, 9, 10–11, 13, 16, 27–31, 42 n.2, 45, 47, 63, 68, 83, 89 n.4, 95, 97–8, 144, 147–8, 161, 170, 172, 181–6, 199–204, 201–6, 206–7, 211–12, 213–19, 221–2, 223, 223 n.7, 226–8, 230, 232 n.1 The Blacks (Les Nègres), 2, 3, 4, 9–11, 13, 14, 16, 27–8, 30, 39, 45–53, 68–76, 79, 83–9, 90 n.5, 90 n.9, 95, 97–8, 120–2, 131–40, 140 n.2, 142, 172,184, 203, 204–5, 209, 211–12, 219–20, 228, 233 n.8 The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, 3, 9 The Maids (Les Bonnes), 1, 2, 10, 12, 16, 25, 28, 30, 32 n.8, 42 n.2, 45, 46, 83, 120, 143, 144, 146–8, 152 n.11, 170–2, 199, 204, 209, 211–13, 217, 223–6, 230, 232 n.1, 233 n.5 ‘The Palestinians’, 7 The Penal Colony, 26


Index 237


Index

Genet, Jean – continued ‘The Preface to The Blacks’, 4, 12, 15, 68–77, 87 The Screens, 2, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 28, 31, 34–42, 45, 46, 57–66, 68, 95, 98, 101–3, 104 n.2, 120–1, 143, 144, 151 n.3, 172, 184, 187–91, 192, 193–8, 203–5, 209, 212, 218–20, 223, 226, 228–32, 232 n.1 The Thief’s Journal, 81, 119, 144, 162, 174, 177 The Tightrope Walker, 108–9 Un chant d’amour, 1, 16, 108, 121, 159–67, 169, 176, 177, 182, 185 ‘What Remains of a Rembrandt’, 39 Giacometti, Alberto, 193 Giannaris, Constantin, 176 Gide, André, 5 Giles, Jane, 16, 185 Girardot, Annie, 170 Gitenet, Jean, 124 Goffman, Erving, 216 Goldmann, Lucien, 9, 15, 48–50 Gordon, Charles, 132 Gossett, Louis, 132 Goya, Francisco, 203 Goytisolo, Juan, 144, 150 Grant, Lee, 184, 185 Grotowski, Jerzy, 12, 36 Guttman, Laurent, 3 Hall, Peter, 204 Hands, Terry, 17, 32 n.5, 196, 199–205, 206–7, 208–12 Hanrahan, Mairéad, 164 Hansberry, Lorraine, 73, 131–2, 135–6, 139, 140 n.2 Hansen, Jim, 58 Hargreaves, Martin, 13, 15–16 Hart, Harvey, 175 Haughton, David, 112 Haynes, Todd, 1, 177–8 Hegt, Saskia, 216 Helpmann, Robert, 112 Herbert, John, 175 Hijikata, Tatsumi, 106, 109–12, 115 n.2 Hilliard, David, 115 n.6 Hirt, Eléonore, 195

Ho Chi Minh, 8 Hoover, J. Edgar, 184 Hoyle, David, 175 Hubert, Marie-Claude, 81, 88 Hughes, Langston, 131–2, 137, 138–9 Ibsen, Henrik, 218, 220 Innes, Christopher, 112, 114 Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, 167 n.6 Ionesco, Eugène, 12, 181, 213 Ishii, Mitsutaka, 110 Jackson, George, 96 Jackson, Glenda, 171 Jameson, Joyce, 183 Jarman, Derek, 112–13, 176, 209 Jeffries, Lynn, 16, 187–91 Johnstone, Keith, 224 Jolivet, Pierre-Alain, 170 Jones, Amelia, 117–18, 126 Jones, James Earl, 132, 133–4, 137, 142 Jones, LeRoi, 139 Jonson, Ben, 31 n.1 Jordan, Neil, 175–6 Jouvet, Louis, 46 Joyce, James, 172 Kafka Franz, 104, 204 Kalitowski, Toby, 176 Kantor, Tadeusz, 35 Kaprow, Allan, 77 n.11, 98–9 Kemp, Lindsay, 16, 106–7, 112–14, 178 n.3, 209 Kennedy, Adrienne, 139, 140 n.2 Kershaw, Baz, 39 Killens, John O., 137 King, Woodie, Jr, 138 Kinney, Donald, Robert Kinney, 171 Kirby, Michael, 97 Kirby, Vicki, 166, 167 n.2 Klein, William, 109 Koltès, Bernard-Marie, 40–1, 149, 194 Kristeva, Julia, 118–19, 222 Kruger, Barbara, 117 Kubiak, Anthony, 10 Kubrick, Stanley, 184 Kwietniowski, Richard, 176


238


La Argentina, see Antonia Mercé Laban, Rudolf von, 231 Laing, R. D., 218 Laroche, Hadrien, 167 Laurel, Stan, 175 Lavelli, Jorge, 145 Lavery, Carl, 7, 15, 16 Lecoq, Jacques, 224, 229, 231, 232, 233 Lheureux, Albert-André, 176 Lifar, Serge, 107 Lingis, Alphonso, 167 Little, Stuart, 132–3 Living Theatre, The, 12, 220 Locke, Philip, 207 Lorca, Federico García, 149–50 Lusarreta, Francisco Muñoz, 146 Lust, Geraldine, 132 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 13 Mabou Mines, 220 MacGowan, Shane, 1 Maddow, Ben, 172, 182–3 Mailer, Norman, 135 Malina, Judith, 17 n.5 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 29–30 Malraux, André, 102 Manceaux, Michèle, 6 Manifesto of the 121, 5 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 209 Maréchal, Marcel, 229 Marsillach, Adolfo, 146 Matsumoto, Toshio, 175 May, Jodhi, 172 May 1968, 5, 8, 17 n.3, 34, 39, 40, 103–4, 204 Maybury, John, 176 Mazursky, Paul, 170 McKenzie, Jon, 38–9 McLucas, Clifford, 101, 102 McLuhan, Marshal, 59 Meckler, Nancy, 172 Meek, Scott, 174 Meisner, Nadine, 112 Memmi, Albert, 70 Mercé, Antonia (La Argentina), 111 metatheatre, 11, 75–6, 97 Miles, Christopher, 171 Millet, Kate, 9 Milstead, Harris Glenn, 175

Miranda, Carmen, 113–14 Mirren, Helen, 207 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 118, 123 Mitchell, John Cameron, 175 Molière, Jean-Baptiste, 24 Morales, María Luz, 151 n.7 Moreau, Jeanne, 170, 173–4 Moreno, Armando, 144–5, 150, 151 n.4 Morihien, Paul, 167 n.3 Morrow, Vic, 170 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 89, 100 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 64 National Endowment for the Arts, 177 NEC, see Negro Ensemble Company Negro Digest, 131 Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), 138 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 159–60, 163, 166 Nieva, Francisco, 144 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 107, 112, 159, 161 Nimoy, Leonard, 170, 172, 185 Nixon, Richard, 202 Noh theatre, 174, 223 Nordey, Stanislas, 2 Nunn, Trevor, 199, 208, 210 Odéon Theatre (Théâtre de l’Odéon), 8, 35, 95, 102 Ofili, Chris, 86, 90 n.8 Ohno, Kazuo, 16, 106–14, 115 Ohno, Yoshito, 109, 111 Ordóñez, Marcos, 150 Oshima, Nagisa, 174 O’Wisiedo, Mayreta, 147, 148, 151 n.10 Palestinians, 6–8, 44, 50, 64, 80, 84, 89, 174, 210 Pane, Gina, 122 Papatakis, Nico, 170–1 Papin sisters, 170 Pasqual, Lluís, 144 Pavis, Patrice, 36 Performance Group, 213, 216 performativity, 3–4, 13, 71, 95, 108–15, 118, 143–50, 159–67, 213–14, 217 Performing Garage, The, 216, 221–2 Picasso, Pablo, 167 n.4 Pickering, Kenneth, 10 Pinod, Julie, 195


Index 239


Index

Pirandello, Luigi, 24, 26, 97, 213, 220 Piscator, Erwin, 17 n.5 The Pit (The Barbican), 212 Planchon, Roger, 34 Poliorama Theatre, 146, 154–5 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 102 postmodernism, 4, 11, 36–42, 45, 59–66, 118, 209 see also Baudrillard; spectacle post-structuralism, 3, 95 Prévert, Jacques, 171

Racine, Jean 24, 49, 202 racism, 6, 8, 71, 75, 114, 120, 131–2 Rajon, Sébastien, 3 Rauch, Bill, 16, 187–91 Rayns, Tony, 169 Red Army Faction, 5, 84 Redonnet, Marie, 68–9 Regnault, François, 194, 198 revolution, 4–14, 83–9, 99–104, 175–6, 229 see also Black Panther Party; engagement; Palestinians; Situationism; The Balcony; The Blacks and The Screens Reilly, Nancy, 218, 220 Riaza, Luis, 144 Richardson, Joely, 172 Ripploh, Frank, 173 Rivers, Dick, 195 Roach, Max, 132–3 Robespierre, Maximilien, 201–2 Ross, Kristin, 57, 103, 104 n.4 Rouleau, Raymond, 46, 70 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 199, 208, 212 Rudkin, David, 17 n.4, 206–7, 210–11

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 11, 24, 31, 32 n.7, 36, 50–2, 68, 74, 76, 81–2, 83, 145, 171, 215 Sastre, Jean-Baptiste, 2, 16, 193–8 Satie, Erik, 167 n.4 Savona, Jeanette, 150 Schechner, Richard, 1, 16–17, 38, 213–20, 221–2, 223, 233 n.5 Schlöndorff, Volker, 172–3 Schneeman Carolee, 122 Schröter, Werner, 173 Sellars, Peter, 1, 2, 17 n.5, 42, 95–6, 151 n.3, 187, 188–91, 192, 220 The Screens/Los biombos, 2, 17 n.2, 42, 95–6, 151 n.3, 187, 192 Semon, Larry, 175 Sénémaud, Lucien, 169 Senghor, Léopold, 51–2, 86 Serrano, Julieta, 144, 147–8, 150, 154–5 Shakespeare, William, 145, 187, 190, 200, 204–5, 208 Shaw, George Bernard, 220 Shevtsova, Maria, 14–15 Shibusawa, Tatsuhiko, 115 n.2 Situationism, 74–7 see also Debord, everyday life, spectacle, Vaneigem Smith, Jack, 175 Smith, Patti, 1, 209 Soyinka, Wole, 204–5, 211 Spackman, Helen, 124–5 spectacle, 9, 57–66, 74–7, 209 Stein, Peter, 17 n.5 Stephens, Elizabeth, 16 St Mark’s Playhouse, 134, 138, 142 Stonewall riots, 175 Stravinsky, Igor, 184 Strehler, Giorgio, 17 n.5 Strick, Joseph, 16, 170, 172, 181–6 Suárez, Emma, 150 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 172

Sadler’s Wells, 113 Said, Edward, 72, 121 Sánchez-Gijón, Aitana, 150 Sandier, Gilles, 143 Sarraute, Nathalie, 35

Tartaglia, Jerry, 176 Taubman, Howard, 135 Tel Quel, 5 Temple, Shirley, 112 terrorism, 3, 68–9, 88

queer, 5, 13, 16, 106, 112–15, 118–26, 169, 172–8, 215–16 see also abjection; Un chant d’amour


240


Thatcher, Margaret, 121, 205 Théâtre de la Cité Universitaire, 149 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season, 209 Théâtre Marigny, 160 Théâtre National de Chaillot (Chaillot), 2, 193, 194, 198 theatricality, 4, 8, 11–17, 24–32, 34–43, 47–8, 50–3, 63–4, 75–6, 122, 134–6, 172, 225–7 Tse-Tung, Mao, 5, 8 Turner, Barbara, 170 Turner, Victor, 38, 39, 120 Turner Ward, Douglas, 138, 139, 140 n.2 Tyson, Cicely, 132 Valéry, Paul, 23, 32 n.2 Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del, 150 Vaneigem, Raoul, 95, 99, 101, 103–4 Van Gannep, Arnold, 120 Vawter, Ron, 215, 216, 222 Vérical, Michel, 3 Vietnam, 102, 103, 174, 218 Village Voice, 131, 135 Vinaver, Michel, 35 Volanakis, Minos, 171 Walters, Julie, 172 Warhol, Andy, 174 Warrick, John, 16, 73

Watanabe, Moriaki, 17 n.5 Watergate, 202 Waters, John, 175 Weber, Samuel, 65 Weiss, Peter, 146, 209 White, Edmund, 5, 9, 89 n.4, 144, 172 Whitton, David, 146 Wigman, Mary, 111 Wilde, Oscar, 173, 176 Wilder, Billy, 175 Wildmon, Reverend Donald, 177 Williams, Mance, 136 Williams, Nigel, 1, 37, 44, 46 Williams, Peter, 113 Williams, Raymond, 9 Wilson, Robert, 35 Winters, Shelley, 172, 184–5 Woodward, Paul, 16 Wooster Group, The, 37 Wright, Barbara, 32 n.5, 199–200 York, Susannah, 171 Zadek, Peter, 184, 204 Zatlin, Phyllis, 144 Zeami, 219–20 Zen, 231 Zizek, Slavoj, 80, 85–7, 88 Zola, Emile, 5


Index 241


Jean Genet: Performance and Politics

Performance and Cultural Politics

Saint Genet, actor and martyr

Jean

Jean

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance

Performance Politics and the British Voter

Politics and performance in contemporary Northern Ireland

Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina

Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition

Unmarked: the politics of performance

genet - 4 horas en Chatila

The Politics of Jean-Francois Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory

Jean and Johnny

Pierre and Jean

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Performance Interventions)

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Performance Interventions)

Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture

Actors and Activists: Performance, Politics, and Exchange Among Social Worlds

Jean Baudrillard

Practical Jean

Jean Rhys

Practical Jean

Practical Jean

Echenoz, Jean

pierre jean

Jean Loup

Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics

Semi-Presidentialism: Sub-Types and Democratic Performance (Comparative Politics)

Jean Genet: Performance and Politics

Performance and Cultural Politics

Saint Genet, actor and martyr

Jean

Jean

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance

Performance Politics and the British Voter

Politics and performance in contemporary Northern Ireland

Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina

Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition

Unmarked: the politics of performance

genet - 4 horas en Chatila

The Politics of Jean-Francois Lyotard: Justice and Political Theory

Jean and Johnny

Pierre and Jean

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Performance Interventions)

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Performance Interventions)

Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture

Actors and Activists: Performance, Politics, and Exchange Among Social Worlds

Jean Baudrillard

Practical Jean

Jean Rhys

Practical Jean

Practical Jean

Echenoz, Jean

pierre jean

Jean Loup

Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics

Semi-Presidentialism: Sub-Types and Democratic Performance (Comparative Politics)

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