Jean Genet’s notorious, outrageous play revived
LES PARAVENTS JEAN GENET Odéon, Théâtre de l’Europe, Paris, until June 19
JEAN GENET’S Les Paravents (The Screens) is a chaotic beast of a play, three-plus hours of deranged Algerian War-era burlesque. Now on revival at the Odéon theatre in Paris in a new production from Arthur Nauzyciel, it received its national premiere on the same stage on April 21, 1966. That was four years after Algerian independence and the fifth anniversary to the day of a last, unsuccessful putsch in Algiers against a government in Paris slowly coming to terms with defeat. Under the direction of Roger Blin, who had co-signed a public letter in 1960 defending the Algerian revolutionaries, the 1966 release set off a powder-keg. During the April 29 performance, a group of far-right agitators took as their cue the iconic farting scene – when Genet’s French lieutenant gets a volley of gas from his men – and hurled chairs, glass bottles and smoke bombs on stage. “That this play was written by a notorious pederast, thief, deserter and former prostitute known throughout Europe’s underworld is an unprecedented scandal”, one veterans’ collective exclaimed in a press release issued the next day. With parliamentarians clamouring for the cancellation of the Odéon’s subsidies during an autumn re-run of the production, André Malraux, Charles de Gaulle’s culture minister, intervened in Genet’s defence. “Anyone who has read this play knows very well that it’s not anti-French”, Malraux told the National Assembly. “It’s anti-human. It’s anti-everything. Genet is no more anti-French than Goya is anti-Spanish.”
Even Genet alleged that this strange masterpiece, which he worked on over several years before its initial publication in 1961, was not about Algeria per se. Of course, this was a way of holding up a mirror to a press and political class that prudishly referred to the Algerian War as “the events”. But Les Paravents is unmistakably a broadside against colonialism and a France wallowing in the psychodrama of imperial decline. The action is set in nameless “Arab town” in thrall to metastasizing agitation and echoes of revolt. But beyond that, the central register throughout is chaotic absurdity. It’s best enjoyed as a series of colliding, amorphous and often inconclusive vignettes.
As he imagined it, is Genet’s drama even performable? The text calls for a jumble of elevations and platforms, in an attempt to spatially render domination and its erosion. Chronologically, it is divided into sixteen “tableaux”, a montage of scenes that bleed together thanks to the interplay of rollable canvas screens, denoting different objects or places and on which the characters often draw, etching their desires and actions onto the otherwise sparse décor. White colonists, gendarmes and troops from the colonial army
