The Screens
by Jean Genet
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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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Like most Genet that I've read, it was so long ago (although I think I probably read this one much more recently) that I barely remember it. I remember its only scenery being screens. Genet, always political, does something that always interests me: he makes explicit political commentary at the same time that he manages to transcend the obvious w/ a higher formal level. Just as he used role-playing in The Balcony to unhinge the fixedness of people's role-playing in daily life, here I interpret his use of screens as a meta-device for partitioning off different levels of 'reality'. Just as in math, "grouping" can be used to determine whether an infinite series equals 1 or 0, here screens can be used to partition off matters of life & show more death & make them more ambiguous w/o taking away the hard study that Genet makes of them. show less
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Best 20th Century French Plays
30 works; 4 members
Author Information
143+ Works 10,200 Members
Jean Genet was born in Paris, France on December 19, 1910. He was an illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, raised by Public Assistance, and sent to live with foster parents at the age of seven. At the age of 10 he was accused of stealing. He spent five years at the Mettray Reformatory and as a young adult spent time in various European show more prisons for vagrancy, homosexuality, theft, and smuggling. He began writing in 1942, while in prison. His works include Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, and The Thief's Journal. In 1948, he was convicted of burglary for the 10th time and condemned to automatic life imprisonment. However, by 1947, his works had gained attention from such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. After the sentence, they petitioned for his release and a pardon was granted. In the late 1940s, Genet began to write for the theatre, but several of his plays were too controversial to be performed in France. His plays included The Maids, Deathwatch, The Blacks, and The Balcony. He died on April 15, 1986. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Awards and Honors
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Gallimard, Folio (1309)
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Screens
- Original title
- Les Paravents
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Statistics
- Members
- 240
- Popularity
- 133,859
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.70)
- Languages
- 5 — English, Finnish, French, Portuguese, Turkish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 17
- ASINs
- 9
