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:
The Balcony Jean Genet Summary
- 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.
- 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.
- Genet provocatively portrays modern society, tearing away the masks of social roles and revealing the nature of power. Vaudeville and philosophy, revolution and counter-revolution, illusion and reality are intertwined in the play. The Balcony has been staged in different theaters of the world many times. The play was interpreted by the great.
- Unlike the later film, Genet was actually involved in the film version of The Balcony, collaborating with Strick on the original treatment but leaving the final screenplay to poet and novelist Ben Maddow. Strick acquired the rights to The Balcony from Genet only after failing to mount another literary adaptation, of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Play by Jean Genet, produced and published in 1956 as Le Balcon. Influenced by the Theater of Cruelty, The Balcony contains nine scenes, eight of which are set inside the Grand Balcony bordello. The brothel is a repository of illusion in a contemporary European city. 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.
Regarding their function as messages, dreams use the mechanism of symbols. This happens in order for the dream’s symbolic message to break through the defenses of the ‘Ego’ and reach the conscious level of the person. Then, when interpreted, the message can be realized by the person.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.
Genet The Balcony Pdf
