Jean Genet and the politics of theatre is the first publication to situate the politics of Genet's theatre within the social, spatial and political contexts of France in the 1950s and 1960s. The book's innovative approach departs significantly from existing scholarship on Genet. Where scholars have tended to bracket Genet as either an absurdist, ritualistic or, more recently, a resistant playwright, this study argues that his theory and practice of political theatre have more in common with the affirmative ideas of thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. By doing so, the monograph positions Genet as a revolutionary playwright, interested in producing progressive forms of democracy. This original and interdisciplinary reading of Genet’s late work will be of interest to students and practitioners of Theatre, as well as those interested in French and History.
This book is about watching theatre; and how to utilise a corporeal semiotics to read genres of contemporary theatre. It suggests that three key concepts interact: genre, the formal term that structures theatricality, including the textual grammar of a dramatic work, its performance style, theatrical frame, and mode of rhetorical address; corporeality, an assemblage of the troubling physical work of the actors, the figurative forms in the text, and the ambivalent bodies of the spectators; and performance, the presenting of theatre as symbolic action in the social world. In order to develop new models of embodied spectatorship, these essays examine canonical productions of Medea, King Lear, Miss Julie, Genesi: The Museum of Sleep directed by Deborah Warner, Barrie Kosky, Anne Bogart, and Romeo Castellucci. With close attention to bodies and texts in performance, the book argues that to watch theatre is an intimate, yet political, atunement to processes of human transfiguration. It concludes by offering a reinvigorated perspective on tragedy and tragic experience in the theatre.
Explicitly political, The Screens is set within the context of the Algerian War. The play's cast of over fifty characters moves through seventeen scenes, the world of the living breaching the world of the dead by means of shifting the screens--the only scenery--in a brilliant tour de force of spectacle and drama.
The shattering novel of underground life the New York Times called “a cry of rapture and horror . . . the purest lyrical genius.” Jean Genet’s debut novel Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be his masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. A semi- autobiographical account of one man’s journey through the Paris demi-monde, dubbed “the epic of masturbation” by no less a figure than Jean-Paul Sartre, the novel’s exceptional value lies in its exquisite ambiguity.
This book is the only introductory text to Genet in English, offering an overview of this key figure in defining and understanding twentieth-century theatre. The authors provide a comprehensive account of Genet's key plays and productions, his early life and his writing for and beyond the theatre.
Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author's commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet's most overtly political book is also his most personal—the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief's Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet's final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.
"In this book, Gene A. Plunka argues that the most important single element that solidifies all of Genet's work is the concept of metamorphosis. Genet's plays and prose demonstrate the transition from game playing to the establishment of one's identity through a state of risk taking that develops from solitude. However, risk taking per se is not as important as the rite of passage. Anthropologist Victor Turner's work in ethnography is used as a focal point for the examination of rites of passage in Genet's dramas." "Rejecting society, Genet has allied himself with peripheral groups, marginal men, and outcasts--scapegoats who lack power in society. Much of their effort is spent in revolt or direct opposition in mainstream society that sees them as objects to be abused. As an outcast or marginal man, Genet solved his problem of identity through artistic creation and metamorphosis. Likewise, Genet's protagonists are outcasts searching for positive value in a society over which they have no control; they always appear to be the victims or scapegoats. As outcasts, Genet's protagonists establish their identities by first willing their actions and being proud to do so." "Unfortunately, man's sense of Being is constantly undermined by society and the way individuals react to roles, norms, and values. Roles are the products of carefully defined and codified years of positively sanctioned institutional behavior. According to Genet, role playing limits individual freedom, stifles creativity, and impedes differentiation. Genet equates role playing with stagnant bourgeois society that imitates rather than invents; the latter is a word Genet often uses to urge his protagonists into a state of productive metamorphosis. Imitation versus invention is the underlying dialectic between bourgeois society and outcasts that is omnipresent in virtually all of Genet's works." "Faced with rejection, poverty, oppression, and degradation, Genet's outcasts often escape their horrible predicaments by living in a world of illusion that consists of ceremony, game playing, narcissism, sexual and secret rites, or political charades. Like children, Genet's ostracized individuals play games to imitate a world that they can not enter. Essentially, the play acting becomes catharsis for an oppressed group that is otherwise confined to the lower stratum of society." "Role players and outcasts who try to find an identity through cathartic game playing never realize their potential in Genet's world. Instead, Genet is interested in outcasts who immerse themselves in solitude and create their own sense of dignity free from external control. Most important, these isolated individuals may initially play games, yet they ultimately experience metamorphosis from a world of rites, charades, and rituals to a type of "sainthood" where dignity and nobility reign. The apotheosis is achieved through a distinct act of conscious revolt designed to condemn the risk taker to a degraded life of solitude totally distinct from society's norms and values." --Book Jacket.
This edited collection brings together a team of internationally prominent academics and delivers cutting-edge discourse on the strongly emerging tradition of experimentation in contemporary British theatre - redefining what the dramatic stands for today. Each chapter of the collection focuses on influential contemporary plays and playwrights.
Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shepard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.
Every artist has a dream project an enterprise that he or she has continuously taken up but never completed. Via archived notes and drafts, a retrospective reconstitution of such projects can serve as a key for better understanding the authors artistic corpus. The present study reaches out to the authorship of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini. Claudel deferred and never completed the fourth segment of his Trilogie des Coufontaine. The only indication of the existence of this prospective fourth part of the theatre sequence is a brief entry in his Journal. In 1949, he began writing a third version of his first great work Tête d'Or. Like the unfinished fourth section that was to be added to the trilogy, the draft of the third version of Tête d'Or reveals a dialogue between the Old and New Testaments a theme that appears to be central to Claudel's entire corpus. Genet labored over La Mort for many years. At the conclusion of Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952), Sartre mentions this final work of Genet. Genet discussed his progress on La Mort in correspondence and even published Fragments of La Mort in the literary magazine Les Temps Modernes. While the project never came to fruition, it nevertheless remains an important means through which to understand Genets work. The aborted production of Fellinis Voyage de G. Mastorna has become a legend. After 8" and Giulietta degli spiriti, Fellini wrote a screenplay that he began to film but subsequently abandoned, much to the chagrin of producer Dino de Laurentiis who had already invested in sets and costumes. Fellini would often revisit this project, but never completed it. This book also examines additional dream projects taken from different art forms: poetry (Mallarmés Le Livre); literature (Vignys Daphné); painting (Monets Nymphéas); music (Schoenbergs Moses und Aron); and various films (Clouzots LEnfer, Viscontis La Recherche, Kubricks Napoleon, etc.).
