Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #533615 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802150349
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
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 aflame with revolution. After the city's royal palace and rulers are destroyed, the bordello's costumed patrons impersonate the leaders of the city. As the masqueraders warm to their roles, they convince even the revolutionaries that the illusion created in the bordello is preferable to reality. -- The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature

Customer Reviews

Thin line between the straight world and a brothel
The madame of the famous Grand Balcony brothel provides a safe place where her clients can come to act out their fantasies and take on the identities of important government and religious figures in the real world. Outside the brothel, a revolution is raging, assisted by a former prostitute of the Grand Balcony who uses her voice to spur the rebels on to a greater victory. When the government finally topples, the whores and clients work together to take their impersonations out of the bedroom and restore order by assuming the identities of the great figures who they used to play in bed.

Sartre referred to Genet as the prototype of the existential man, whose past as a convicted felon and his subsequent literary career illustrated a life where personal choice drove the moral distinctions. I have read an been absorbed by a number of Genet's works, my favorites being _Our Lady of the Flowers_ and _The Maids_. While I don't believe that _The Balcony_ is up to the level of either of those works, it's an important piece of the history of the theater of the absurd.

Worth reading. Perhaps now more than ever in a world where actors regularly transition to politics.

Ingtruiging, confusing, full of risky ideas
The ideas that life is an illusion and that we are all actors perpetuating our own illusions are fascinating. This book contains some intruiging Existential ideas. I did get confused at times over who was playing which role.

Confusing, Funny, Ingenious
A great play about the continuum of illusions and reality and power as a result of positioning hehe
It is especially relevant now when our world "where everything -- you can be quite sure, is falser than here"