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Balcony

Jean Genet
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Author_Jean Genet
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Rebellion

Product details

  • ISBN 9780571250301
  • Weight: 150g
  • Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 19 Mar 2009
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

Jean Genet's The Balcony, which premiered in 1957, is acknowledged as one of the founding plays of modern theatre: philosopher Lucien Goldmann dubbed it 'the first great Brechtian play in French literature'.

In a brothel of an unnamed French city the madam, Irma, directs a series of fantastical scenarios - a bishop forgives a penitent, a judge punishes a thief, a general rides astride his horse. Outside, an uprising threatens to engulf the streets. The patrons of the brothel wait anxiously for the chief of police to arrive, but in his place comes the queen's envoy to inform the assembled that the figureheads of the establishment have been killed in the uprising. Play-acting turns to reality as the patrons don their costumes in public in an attempt to quell the insurrection.

Illusion and reality, order and dissolution - these are the grand themes of The Balcony.
About Jean Genet
Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France's leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau.$$$His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief's Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid's (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). Jean Genet died in 1986.

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