The Screens (French : Les Paravents) is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. [1] Its first few productions all used abridged versions, beginning with its world premiere under Hans Lietzau's direction in Berlin in May 1961. [2] Its first complete performance was staged in Stockholm in 1964, two years before Roger Blin directed its French premiere in Paris. [3]
Genet was writing the piece as a war of independence was being conducted in French colonial Algeria. The work has no narrative structure, but comprises a series of 17 individual scenes depicting insurrection (in an unspecified Arab land) against a mindless and blundering colonial power. Although the occupying army is not identified as specifically French (nor is the action intended to depict the then-recent Algerian insurgence: the French conquest of Algeria in the 1840s is also referenced), when the play was first performed in France, at the eminent Odéon theatre, Paris, in 1966 it was seen as a provocative insult to national prestige and caused serious protest demonstrations. [4]
The "screens" of the title are metaphors: in one sense, for example, they stand for on-screen television news reports filtering out the ugly realities of war, both political and physical. But they are also real stage properties, mounted on rubber wheels and manipulated, as part of the action, by a visible stagehand. [5] [6] As the play develops, the performers make drawings of the scenes being acted out onto the screens. [6]
Genet began writing the play in 1955 and continued to develop it over the following few years, completing a first version in June 1958. [7] He re-wrote the play further while in Greece towards the end of 1959. [8] Marc Barbezat's publishing company L'Arbalèt published it in February 1961, after which Genet re-wrote the play again. [8] It was first published in English by Grove Press, New York in 1962 (translated by Bernard Frechtman [9] ), with Faber and Faber publishing the UK edition the following year. In 1976, Genet published a second, revised version, which appears in the French edition of his Complete Works. [10]
The play premièred in an abridged German version in May 1961 at the Schlosspark-Theater in Berlin, which Hans Lietzau directed. [11] A slightly revised version of the problematic German translation used in Berlin was staged by Leon Epp two years later at the Volkstheater in Vienna in 1963. [3] Epp's interpretation emphasised the political conflict between the French and Algerians in the play. [12]
In 1964 in London, Peter Brook staged two-thirds of the play (its first twelve scenes, in a performance that lasted for two-and-a-half hours) at the Donmar Rehearsal Rooms as part of his experimental "Theatre of Cruelty" season with the Royal Shakespeare Company; he abandoned plans to stage the complete text, partly due to dissatisfaction with Bernard Frechtman's translation. There were no public performances: the rehearsal space was fitted out with seating to form an improvised theatre and the audience for the fully staged and costumed final version was by invitation only. [13] An abridgement by Howard Brenton, with a running time of three hours, was mounted by Walter Donohue, the RSC literary editor, at the Bristol Old Vic studio in 1973. [14] [15]
The play's first complete performance was directed by Per Verner Carlsson at the Stockholm City Theatre in 1964. [3] Its five-hour-long production required six months of rehearsal preparation. [12]
Roger Blin directed the play's French première at the Odéon theatre in Paris, which opened on 21 April 1966. [16] Genet became closely involved in rehearsals and published a series of letters to Blin about the theatre, the play, and the progress of its production. [17] André Acquart designed the sets and costumes, providing via three collapsible platforms four levels which 27 gliding screens divided into different playing areas, with "sumptuous and theatrical" costumes and make-up. [18] Madeleine Renaud played Warda, Jean-Louis Barrault played the Mouth, María Casares played the Mother, and Amidou played Saïd. [19] Blin directed a German production in Essen in November 1967. [20]
Minos Volanakis directed the play's US première in New York 1971. [21] Patrice Chéreau directed a production at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers in Nanterre, near Paris, in 1983. [22] In 1989 Joanne Akalaitis directed Paul Schmidt's translation at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, with Jesse Borrego as Said, and music by Philip Glass and Foday Musa Suso.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett's reworking of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled "a tragicomedy in two acts".
Cecil Antonio Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer whose career spanned five decades. In 1964, he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film Tom Jones.
Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism and surrealism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 1973 Jerusalem Prize.
The theatre of the absurd is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence.
Jean Genet was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His major works include the novels The Thief's Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers and the plays The Balcony, The Maids and The Screens.
Epic theatre is a theatrical movement that arose in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners who responded to the political climate of the time through the creation of new political dramas. Epic theatre is not meant to refer to the scale or the scope of the work, but rather to the form that it takes. Epic theatre emphasizes the audience's perspective and reaction to the piece through a variety of techniques that deliberately cause them to individually engage in a different way. The purpose of epic theatre is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to see their world as it is.
I Am My Own Wife is a play by Doug Wright based on his conversations with the German antiquarian Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. The one-person play premiered Off-Broadway in 2003 at Playwrights Horizons. It opened on Broadway later that year. The play was developed with Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project, and Kaufman also acted as director. Jefferson Mays starred in the Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, playing some forty roles. Wright received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work.
A premiere, also spelled première, is the debut of a work, i.e. play, film, dance, musical composition, or even a performer in that work.
The Maids is a 1947 play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris in a production that opened on 17 April 1947, which Louis Jouvet directed.
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.
Miss Julie is a naturalistic play written in 1888 by August Strindberg. It is set on Midsummer's Eve and the following morning, which is Midsummer and the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist. The setting is an estate of a count in Sweden. Miss Julie is drawn to a senior servant, a valet named Jean, who is well-traveled and well-read. The action takes place in the kitchen of Miss Julie's father's manor, where Jean's fiancée, a servant named Christine, cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and Miss Julie talk.
Roger Blin was a French actor and director. He staged world premieres of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1953 and Endgame in 1957.
The Blacks is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Published in 1958, it was first performed in a production directed by Roger Blin at the Théâtre de Lutèce in Paris, France, which opened on 28 October 1959.
Victor Garcia (Tucumán, Argentina; December 16, 1934 – Paris; August 28, 1982), was an Argentine award-winning theatre director.
Minos Volonakis was a Greek theatre director and translator.
Hans Lietzau was a German theatre director, actor, and producer. He was born in Berlin, Germany. In 1953 he directed Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers, with Ernst Schröder as Karl Moor. From 1969 to 1970 he was the theatre manager of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. He directed the German première of the French dramatist Jean Genet's play The Balcony in 1959 and the world première of his play The Screens in 1961, both of which played at the Schlosspark-Theater in Berlin.
Armoured Train 14–69 is a 1927 Soviet play by Vsevolod Ivanov. Based on his 1922 novel of the same name, it was the first play that he wrote and remains his most important. In creating his adaptation, Ivanov transformed the passive protagonist of his novel into an active exponent of proletarian ideals; the play charts his journey from political indifference to Bolshevik heroism. Set in Eastern Siberia during the Civil War, it dramatises the capture of ammunition from a counter-revolutionary armoured train by a group of partisans led by a peasant farmer, Nikolai Vershinin. It is a four-act play in eight scenes that features almost 50 characters; crowd scenes form a prominent part of its episodic dramatic structure. Near the end of the play a Chinese revolutionary, Hsing Ping-wu, lies down on the railway tracks to force the armoured train to stop.
Marianne de Pury is a Swiss theatre artist and composer born in St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is best known as the musical composer of two 1966 anti-war plays, Jean-Claude van Itallie's social satire America Hurrah and Megan Terry's rock musical Viet Rock.
Selma Vaz Dias, also known as Selma Cohen-Vaz Dias, was a British actress, writer, and painter. Dias was born in Amsterdam to Jacob Vaz Dias and Hana Hamburger. She had a brother, Salomon. She moved to the United Kingdom, where she spent most of her career.
Werner Düggelin was a Swiss theatre director.