The Screens - Softcover

Jean Genet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571250327 ISBN 13: 9780571250325

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2009

Synopsis

The Screens is the last of Genet's plays to be performed during his lifetime. Its subject is the Algerian War of Independence, and it is an intricately crafted, grandiose construction - beguiling and baffling in equal measure. While the most openly political of Genet's plays, the work is not revolutionary in intent. Rather, as the play progresses the radical direction of lighting and the use of folding canvases serve to segment and compartmentalise the drama, and in so doing they transform the extremities of war into a series of incantatory scenes, vital and ritualistic, that bring stability to an otherwise unbearable reality. Haunting, savage and grotesque, The Screens is none the less an emotionally invigorating work that demonstrates redemption through abjection.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Jean Genet was one of the world's greatest contemporary dramatists, and his last play, The Screens, is his crowning achievement. It strikes a powerful, closing chord to the formidable theatrical work that began with Deathwatch and continued, with even bolder variations, in The Maids, The Balcony, and The Blacks.

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.

"Only a true poet, a man possessed of verbally imagined artistry, could write such a play as The Screens.... [It] reveals a fabulous theatrical imagination, a joy in the creation of stage hyperbole."--Harold Clurman, The Nation

"A play of epic range, of original and devastating theatrical effect...a tidal wave of total theater."--Jack Kroll, Newsweek

"A shocking, brutal, but magnificently dramatic and human work...a culmination of everything Genet has done."--Roger Blin

Jean Genet (1910­1986), an orphan, grew up in a life of crime. He wrote his first novel while serving one of numerous prison sentences for stealing, begging, and smuggling. In 1948 he was condemned to life imprisonment but was pardoned by the president of France at the behest of the country's most eminent writers. Among his most notable works are the novels Our Lady of the Flowers, The Thief's Journal, Funeral Rites, The Miracle of the Rose, and Querelle. Genet was one of the first writers to openly avow his homosexuality and criminality as legitimate literary subjects, creating in his works the hero-criminal and hero-homosexual.

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571250327
• ISBN 13: 9780571250325
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176