The infamous playwright, poet, novelist, and criminal, Jean Genet, was born December 19 th, 1910, in France.Genet’s mother, who was a young prostitute at the time of his birth, gave him up for adoption to a provincial family. The Balcony: A Play - Ebook written by Jean Genet. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read The Balcony: A Play. The Balcony Jean Genet. Enjoy this free preview Unlock all 17 pages of this Study Guide by subscribing today. Scene Summaries & Analyses. Character Analysis. Symbols & Motifs. Important Quotes.
At first glance the play seems to have a chaotic plot, almost delirious.But a much closer look reveals that the plot might have some cohesion.
But, even after a thorough approach, the plot still seems to lack consistency. It looks like the scenes are disconnected, random and delirious, having no relevance or coherence.
Nonetheless, the play has a great appeal to the audiences around the world, because in reality it is a dream.
It’s the dream of every person in the audience and that is something the writer mentions indirectly and discreetly in the final scene of the play.
What’s more, his notes on the design of the set state it clearly: the stage is an extension towards the audience.
Thus, the play is a recount of a dream and dreams, according to the science of psychotherapy, exist to serve two purposes:
- They discharge the unconscious from repressed emotional charges, which have been classified as ‘forbidden’ by the ‘Superego’. Namely, when someone restricts himself from feeling forbidden (by the ‘Superego’) emotions and from doing unacceptable deeds, then the unconscious discharges itself through dreams, so that it won’t explode with unpredictable consequences for the person.
- They send messages from the unconscious to the conscious level, so that the person can realize his unconscious parts.
When someone’s asleep, the defenses of the ‘Ego’ are repressed and that’s why he/she can let go while sleeping.
But, messages from the unconscious, which shatter a person’s ‘Superego’ image of himself, mobilize intense emotional charges and wake him up.
In order for his sleep not to be disturbed, some of the ‘Ego’s’ defenses are still operational, even though most of them are in a repressed state, and continue to filter out messages from the unconscious, which are not compatible with the ‘Superego’ image a person has for himself.
For this reason, the unconscious symbolizes its messages in dreams, so that these messages can go through the ‘Ego’s’ defenses and reach the person’s conscious level, even though most of the aforementioned defenses are repressed during sleep.
The unconscious always sends the right message, which if properly interpreted and accepted by the conscious, then the person can withstand to comprehend and contain it.
According to psychotherapy, every element of a dream (a person, an emotional charge, even a material object) is some part of the person that is dreaming and must be interpreted as such, in order for the person’s level of consciousness to rise.
Furthermore, every part of a dream can be analyzed from many different angles and bring different kinds of consciousness to a person. That’s the reason why the writer places mirrors on stage.
There are times that a dream’s content can be taken as having a delusional form.
The difference between delusion and dream is the following: a delusion is perceived, by the person having it, as reality, whereas a dream, upon waking up, is perceived as something non real (happening outside of the person’s world).
Each dream is a symbolized psychic state, since each dream is a photograph of some part of his psyche.
Thus, the play is the dream of someone dreaming and the psychotheatrological analysis will be for that person.
This person will be each spectator from the audience (from now on called ‘the spectator’).
The heroes of the play will be analyzed as the different parts of ‘the spectator’, namely they will all have the same psychic structure (the same parents), but they will play a different ‘role’ in the emotional pattern of ‘the spectator’.
Since, each role in the play mirrors a different part of ‘the spectator’, the play in its entirety mirrors his complete psyche, and thus every person in the audience sees his/hers own psychic parts on stage through this dream-play.
At the end, Irma awakens the audience and sends them back to the real world.
Since the writer knew that the play is a dream (probably his own), but didn’t state it clearly, he chose to protect the play’s plot from the psychic projections of the director and those of the costume and scenic designers, so that the correct (and not a different) message would reach the audience.
Thus, he gave clear directions for almost everything regarding the play’s staging, except the lighting. That he left it up to the discretion of the director, allowing the scenes to have a different emotional charge according to their lighting setup. He did, nevertheless, state that the chandelier must be the center of the lights on the stage.
Correctly, the author states that the play should be staged, completely in accordance, with his elaborate production notes.
The Balcony Genet Summary
Jean Genet's The Balcony (Le Balcon in original French) is considered by many to be the one of his masterpieces, though it was written after he said he would give up writing plays altogether. The Balcony was his first commercially successful play. Like many of Genet's works, the play was inspired by Genet's contempt for society and obsession with topics such as sex, prostitution, politics, and revolution. Set inside a brothel where common men play men of power in their sexual fantasies, The Balcony reflects on the emptiness of societal roles. Reality and illusion feed off each other in the difficult play. Dreams may make reality tolerable, but when they come true, as when the customers are forced to live the roles they play, it is not as satisfying.
Jean Genet The Balcony
The Balcony was first published in 1956, and was first produced in London on April 22, 1957, at the Arts Theatre Club. Genet did not like the production because it was done in a way that was too tasteful and realistic. His protests led to his banishment from the theater during the production. The play made its American debut in March 1960 at the Circle in the Square Theater, in New York City. There The Balcony ran for 672 performances and won an Obie Award for Genet. It was generally well received, though some critics thought it was hard to understand because of its complexity and reliance on illusion. The first French performance of The Balcony took place in May 1960. Since these initial performances, the play has been produced on a regular basis. As Donald Malcolm of the New Yorker wrote, 'M. Genet's vision of society is both perverse and private, and his play is a species of Grand Guignol arresting, horrific, and trivial.'