THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970

Jean Genet strolls into the theatre carrying a lifetime of defiance. Here is a man who spent his youth as a thief, vagrant, and outcast, a gay man and ex-convict who inverted society’s judgments by embracing the label of “criminal” as a kind of honor. Genet’s art is the art of the outsider, and when he turned to playwriting in the 1940s and 50s, he did so with a flair for ritual and transgression. He once said that treachery, theft, and homosexuality – all the things society shunned – were his sacred themes. On stage, he elevated the outcasts to protagonists and crafted ceremonies of role-playing that exposed the arbitrary nature of power.

Genet’s plays are highly stylized rituals of revolt. They often feature characters enacting elaborate role reversals. Identities in Genet are fluid, layered, performed. As one analysis puts it, his dramas show “ritualistic struggles between outcasts… and their oppressors,” where social identities are parodied and peeled away through theatrical role-play . Take The Maids (1947): two housemaids resent their mistress. Whenever she’s out, they perform a secret ritual – one maid dresses up as the Madame, the other acts the servant – and they act out fantasies of power and humiliation, culminating in an imagined murder. It’s a dark dance of envy and desire, and by the end (when the “game” crosses into reality), we’re left unsure what was pretend and what was real. Genet turns a simple servant-master situation into a hallucinatory ritual about class hatred and the seductive allure of switching roles.