The Balcony by Jean Genet, has come to be recognized as one of the founding plays of modern theatre, and is what the philosopher Lucien Goldman has called ‘the first great Brechtian play in French literature’. In a brothel of an unnamed French city the madam, Irma, directs a series of fantastical scenarios – a bishop forgives a penitent, a judge punishes a thief, a general rides astride his horse. Outside, an uprising threatens to engulf the streets. The patrons of the brothel wait anxiously for the chief of police to arrive, but in his place comes the queen’s envoy to inform that the figureheads of the establishment have been killed in the uprising. Play-acting turns to reality, as the patrons don their costumes in public in the attempt to quell the insurrection. Illusion and reality, order and dissolution – these are the grand themes of “The Balcony”, all refracted through the prism of Genet’s genius.
Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegory in which the pigs in a farm play the role of revolutionaries and overthrow and oust the human owners of the farm. They set it up as a commune in which, at first, all animals are equal. Too soon, however, the pigs, who consider themselves superior in intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power.
The Flies by Jean Paul Sartre, was written in 1943. It is an adaptation of the Electra myth. The play recounts the story of Orestes and his sister Electra in their quest to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon, king of Argos, by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegisthus, who had deposed and killed him. The play is the fullest dramatic development of Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism and it duels on the basic questions of man’s life and the course of human action. Religion; individual freedom; individual responsibility; Fear of enslavement; And the necessity of choice for wholesome living.
