In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Politics of Jean Genet’s Late Theatre: Spaces of Revolution by Carl Lavery
  • Mairéad Hanrahan
The Politics of Jean Genet’s Late Theatre: Spaces of Revolution. By Carl Lavery. (Theatre: Theory, Practice, Performance). Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. x + 254 pp.

This is an engaging and unashamedly utopian reading of Genet. Carl Lavery opens it with panache, presenting the reader with a list of five ambitious and provocative claims, including the statement that Genet ‘possessed his own oblique model of committed theatre’ (p. 5) and sought deliberately in his writing to ‘undermine the consensus on decolonisation which emerged in France in the mid-1950s’ (p. 6). His overarching argument is that, from the 1950s onwards, an interest in promoting collective practices of revolution dominates the last three plays that Genet published (Le Balcon, Les Nègres, Les Paravents), his later ‘political’ writings, and his life. For Lavery, such a radical shift can only have been caused by an external event, which he identifies as the revelation, as described by Genet in ‘Ce qui reste d’un Rembrandt . . . ’, of the existence of a wound shared by all men. This wound at the origin of the ‘identité universelle à tous les hommes’ brought Genet to an awareness that all men are irreducibly equal, and hence to a commitment to a revolutionary practice of art. One might take issue with elements of the argument, such as its lingering teleology, or the assumption that the representation of group action from Le Balcon onwards must be attributable to a single motivating cause, or, as the author himself suggests (p. 50), the ‘recourse to biography’ on which such representation is based. My main reservation, however, concerns the way Lavery’s argument periodizes Genet’s œuvre, dividing it categorically in two with respect to a single decisive turning point whose significance, moreover, can only be inferred retrospectively. This before/after classification necessitates, for instance, an interpretation of the earlier texts as a search for identity, repeatedly equated with an ‘essence’ (see p. 61, for example). Yet, far from an attempt to achieve an essence, the maids’ revolt, it could be argued, represents above all the non-essential (or performative) quality of all identities by showing that the way in which a person is defined can be changed. It could similarly be argued that the earlier texts were also in their own way attempts to write the wound, or that Le Balcon is as much like those texts in revealing a wound at the level of the personal psyche as it is like the later ones in disclosing a wound at the level of society. However, the overly schematic argument should not detract from the very real value of this book, which lies in the close attention the author pays to the ways in which Genet puts the concrete historical context [End Page 274] to work within the three plays. The analyses of how Les Nègres subverts the conventions of the black review show, or how Les Paravents ‘keeps the idea of Algeria at the forefront of consciousness by, perversely, not representing it’ (p. 191), are particularly insightful and subtle. Lavery has produced an original and plausible account of the political effects of Genet’s aesthetic in his last three plays. This is a highly readable and stimulating book that is sure to generate fruitful discussion from future scholars.

Mairéad Hanrahan
University College London
...

pdf

Share