Jean Genet

"Jean Genet has emerged in recent years as a key figure in defining and understanding twentieth-century theatre. This timely book, the only introductory text in English to Genet's plays in production, offers an overview of this influential and controversial writer whose work prefigures many recent postmodern and post-colonial developments in theatre and performance studies. The volume offers clear discussions of Genet's plays, detailing philosophical, historical, political and aesthetic considerations, in order to render the complexity of his theatre exhilarating, rather than intimidating. These concise and accessible presentations included in the book's first half, provide a starting point from which then to explore ways in which different directors, designers and actors have approached Genet's theatre. Genet's plays have been staged many hundreds of times over the past sixty years, from Paris to Tokyo, from London to Saao Paulo. The book includes a spectrum of productions - over 30, from 1947 to 2007 -to illustrate the sheer range of theatrical styles that Genet's texts inspire. Reflecting not only on key plays and productions from the French playwright but on his early life and later political activism, David Bradby and Clare Finburgh provide a comprehensive account of a playwright and theorist whose plays caused rioting in his native country, and whose writing both for and beyond the theatre demonstrate a new approach to the relationships between art and life"--

David Bradby was Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway. He was the UK’s leading specialist in modern French theatre, writing several seminal works on the subject, including Le Theatre en France (2007) and Modern French Drama (1984, 1991). He was also a prolific translator of French dramatists, including Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltes.

Clare Finburgh is Senior Lecturer in Modern Drama at the University of Essex. She has co-edited Genet: Performance and Politics (with Carl Lavery and Maria Shevtsova, 2006) and Contemporary French Theatre and Performance (with Carl Lavery, 2011). She has published many articles on Genet, and a range of contemporary French and Francophone theatre-makers including Valere Novarina, Noelle Renaude and Kateb Yacine.