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Lavery's brilliant analysis of the political meanings of Genet's late drama can be understood as paying homage to Genet's conceptual recedents. Thus does Lavery become part of a unique school of scholars, including Derrida, whose theoretical work reflects mimetically and matches the complexity of Genet's own theorizing. -- Yehuda Moraly. Modern Drama

Lavery’s brilliant analysis of the political meanings of Genet’s late drama can be understood as paying homage to Genet’s conceptual recedents. Thus does Lavery become part of a unique school of scholars, including Derrida, whose theoretical work reflects mimetically and matches the complexity of Genet’s own theorizing. -- .

CARL LAVERY. The Politics of Jean Genet's Theatre: Spaces of Revolution. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010. Pp. 254, illustrated. Reviewed by Yehuda Moraly, Hebrew University Perhaps Genet's rejection of political interpretations of his dramatic work and his avowed dislike of Brecht's theatre provide reasons why scholars have rarely analysed the political meanings of his own theatre. When researchers do look at the political essence of Genet's work (Didier Eribon, Pascal Gaitet), they regard only his political essays and don't emphasize the political messages of his plays, deferring respectfully to Genet's own declarations that his plays are not (merely) political. The Politics of Jean Genet's Late Theatre: Spaces of Revolution, Carl Lavery's important book, comes to fill this void. In numerous papers on Genet's theatre and as the co-editor of Jean Genet: Performance and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Lavery has already proved himself a compelling specialist on the work of Genet. In his most recent book, he develops a theory that he explored earlier in a precedent-setting paper in the Journal of European Studies, The Politics of the Wound: Jean Genet's Ethical Commitment (2003). According to Lavery, the theatre of Genet aims to wound the audience. The wound that Genet intends to inflict on his audience is metaphysical, just as the cruelty of Artaudian theatre was not meant to be strictly physical. In his essays on Rembrandt and Giacometti, Genet writes that each individual hides a secret wound that contains the root of his identity and that the only possible communication between individuals consists in recognition of each other's solitude. Lavery links this theory of the wound to a possible political analysis of Genet's late theatre. He sees the wound as the catalyst for a politics of radical equality (4). Lavery's book is divided into three parts. The first explores the links between Genet's theatre and his political writing. The second part deals with three plays, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens, in relation to their historical and political contexts. The third part investigates productions of Genet's plays as staged by prominent theatre directors and artists: Luis Pascal's The Balcony; Joanne Akalaitis's The Screens and The Balcony; and Ultz and Excalibah's hip-hop version of The Blacks: Blacks Remixed, at Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2007. Each production analysed in this third part offers further interpretation of a play analysed in the second part. At the end of the book, there appears, for the first time in English, the preface to The Blacks, which Genet wrote in 1955 but never published. Genet's aesthetic theories are less well known than his theatrical work, and thus, it is interesting that, often, the most brilliant analyses of that theatrical work stem from considerations of Genet's paradoxical and deeply original theoretical essays. For instance, Sartre's Saint Genet develops an idea that Genet explored first in La Lettre a' Leonor Fini [A Letter to Leonor Fini]: the artist has to aim to be holy. Similarly, Jacques Derrida's Glas is divided into two columns, one dedicated to Genet and the other to Hegel; this divided form appeared earlier in Genet's Ce qui est reste' d'un Rembrandt de'chire' en petits carre's bien re'guliers et jete' aux chiottes [What Is Left of a Rembrandt Torn into Even Little Squares and Tossed into the Crapper], where Genet divides the page into two columns, one providing an analysis of Rembrandt's paintings and the other a description of a trip in which Genet arrives intuitively at the conclusion that each humour is totally equal to the others. Profound analyses of these two divided texts, by Genet and Derrida, respectively, reveal the complex relationships between the meanings of the two sets of columns. Likewise, Lavery's brilliant analysis of the political meanings of Genet's late drama can be understood as paying homage to Genet's conceptual precedents. Thus does Lavery become part of a unique school of scholars, including Derrida, whose theoretical work reflects mimetically and matches the complexity of Genet's own theorizing. -- Yehuda Moraly Modern Drama 20120401 Lavery's brilliant analysis of the political meanings of Genet's late drama can be understood as paying homage to Genet's conceptual recedents. Thus does Lavery become part of a unique school of scholars, including Derrida, whose theoretical work reflects mimetically and matches the complexity of Genet's own theorizing. -- Yehuda Moraly. Modern Drama 20120401

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Carl Lavery is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Aberystwyth University

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