The Balcony

Play written by Jean Genet
the play

The Balcony is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It is set in an unnamed city that is experiencing a revolutionary uprising in the streets; most of the action takes place in an upmarket brothel that functions as a microcosm of the regime of the establishment under threat outside. Since Peter Zadek directed the first English language production at the Arts Theatre Club in London in 1957, the play has been revived frequently (in various versions) and has attracted many prominent directors, including Peter Brook, Erwin Piscator, Roger Blin, Giorgio Strehler, and JoAnne Akalaitis. It has been adapted as a film and given operatic treatment. The play's dramatic structure integrates Genet's concern with meta theatricality and role playing, and consists of two central strands: a political conflict between revolution and counter revolution and a philosophical one between reality and illusion. Genet suggested that the play should be performed as a "glorification of the Image and the Reflection." Genet's biographer Edmund White wrote that with The Balcony, along with The Blacks (1959), Genet re invented modern theatre. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the play as the rebirth of the spirit of the classical Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes, while the philosopher Lucien Goldmann argued that despite its "entirely different world view" it constitutes "the first great Brechtian play in French literature." Martin Esslin has called The Balcony "one of the masterpieces of our time."

Most of the action takes place in an upmarket brothel in which its madam, Irma, "casts, directs, and co ordinates performances in a house of infinite mirrors and theaters." Genet uses this setting to explore roles of power in society; in the first few scenes patrons assume the roles of a bishop who forgives a penitent, a judge who punishes a thief, and a general who rides his horse. Meanwhile, a revolution is progressing outside in the city and the occupants of the brothel anxiously await the arrival of the Chief of Police. Chantal, one of the prostitutes, has quit the brothel to become the embodiment of the spirit of the revolution. An Envoy from the Queen arrives and reveals that the pillars of society (the Chief Justice, the Bishop, the General, etc.) have all been killed in the uprising. Using the costumes and props in Irma's "house of illusions" (the traditional French name for a brothel), the patrons' roles are realised when they pose in public as the figures of authority in a counter revolutionary effort to restore order and the status quo.