Jean Genet: Performance and Politics (review)

This volume of specially commissioned essays, the fruit of an AHRC-funded symposium, is full of ambition. To scholars familiar with Jean Genet's work, it seeks to deliver a much-needed new appraisal of his theatre, informed by important publications in recent decades. Focusing on politics in the broadest sense, it aims to reposition an author latterly seen predominantly as a 'queer outlaw' and novelist. Yet primarily the collection aspires to disseminate knowledge of Genet's theatre and thoughts on performance to new audiences in the English-speaking world. Unusually, the volume targets practitioners: one section describes notable productions of Genet's plays; another comprises interviews with directors who have staged his work. The orientation towards monoglot English speakers doubtless explains the lack of quotations in French, which is doubly disappointing to scholars in French studies, given the significant deficiencies (which the editors highlight) in the English translations of Genet's plays. The editors argue that Genet demands our attention particularly at this historical moment. As a dramatist, he is singularly well placed to enhance Western understanding of an especially pressing contemporary concern: terrorism. Alive to the power of performance to produce realities, Genet's is an affective political theatre that uses performance to terrorize its audience, as Carl Lavery's article on Les Nègres shows. Moreover, Genet's theatre 'supplies the voice that the West refuses to hear' (p. 3), a voice demanding that the West accept responsibility for terrorism directed against it. Going beyond the materialist political engagement of Brecht or Sartre, Genet's stage creations confront us with indictments of Western imperialism and our late capitalist, mass-media consumer society (David Fieni's article on Les Paravents as media allegory is particularly stimulating and topical). Preferring the politics of performance to any politically committed 'call to arms', Genet, it is shown here, speaks to the postmodern age. His insight into the essential hollowness at the heart of all identity (a hollowness that is also a space for ethical renewal) ensures performances that challenge the institution of the theatre, disorienting audiences to political effect. The volume's emphasis on specific performances allows some substantiation of these arguments. A section on innovative adaptations of Genet's work includes, inter alia, Lavery's fascinating article on Genet's plans to realize a site-based performance of Les Paravents staged in a cemetery. The collection contains some strong contributions, such as David Bradby's on performance theory, and the accent put on the practice of staging Genet yields valuable insights. Genet's plays receive uneven treatment, however: Les Nègres and Les Paravents each preoccupy more than one contributor, whereas not one article is devoted to either Les Bonnes or Le Balcon. The rare attention paid in Part V to Genet's forays into ballet and cinema is welcome, but the result is not entirely successful. Elizabeth Stephens discusses dance in Genet, comparing his notion of performativity with Judith Butler's, but Jane Giles's article comprises an edited extract from her 1991 monograph, and eschews Genet's own filmmaking in favour of film adaptations of his non-theatrical works. This volume offers, nonetheless, a long overdue contribution to studies of Genet's theatre, and demonstrates, overall, the enduring richness and relevance of his plays.