Analysis and Criticism
The philosopher Lucien Goldmann suggests that the themes of The Balcony may be divided between those that are essential and primary and those that are non-essential and secondary. Those that we may recognise from Genet's earlier work—the double, the mirror, sexuality, dream-death vs. reality-impure life—belong to the secondary level, he argues, while the play's essential theme is a clear and comprehensible analysis of the transformation of industrial society into a technocracy. Genet relates the experiences of his characters "to the great political and social upheavals of the twentieth century," Goldmann argues, particularly important among which is "the collapse of the tremendous hopes for revolution." He discerns in the play's dramatic structure a balance of three equal movements—"established order, threat to order, and order again re-established." The first section of the play dramatises the way in which the prestigious images of the established order—the Bishop, the Judge, the General—belie the actual bearers of power in modern society:
| “ | Genet employs the image of a house of ilusions, a brothel, in which, it must however be recalled, sexuality plays almost no role, and in which we are principally shown the desire for power . The first scenes show us three typical specimens . What is common to their three dreams is that, contrary to what we will later see to be the social reality, they still confuse prestige with power and identify one with the other. | ” |
Irma and the Chief of Police "possess the real power," Goldmann points out; they "represent the two essential aspects of technocracy: the organization of an enterprise and the power of the State." Consequently, the Chief of Police's dilemma dramatises the historical process of "the growth in prestige of the technicians of repression in the consciousness of the great masses of people." The subject of the play is the transformation by means of which "the Chief of Police comes to be part of the fantasies of power of the people who do not possess it." This process is borne by Roger, the revolutionary leader whose downfall forms part of the third section:
| “ | Roger the plumber comes to the house of illusions—like those who earlier had dreamed of being Judge, Bishop or General—to live out for a few hours his dream of being a technician of power. Yet by doing that, Genet tells us, the revolutionary who dreams of being Chief of Police castrates himself as a revolutionary. | ” |
To the extent that "realism" is understood as "the effort to bring to light the essential relationships that at a particular moment govern both the development of the whole of social relations and—through the latter—the development of individual destinies and the psychological life of individuals," Goldmann argues that The Balcony has a realist structure and characterises Genet as "a very great realist author":
| “ | One may disagree with the lack of hope that prevails in Genet's play. But it would be difficult to deny that it is perfectly realistic insofar as it transposes onto the literary level the fundamental transformations that modern society has undergone over the past forty years, and also that it does this in a particularly clear and comprehensible manner. | ” |
While Goldmann detects an "extremely strong" Brechtian influence in The Balcony, Carol Rosen characterises Genet's dramaturgy as "Artaudian." "Just as Mme. Irma's brothel is the intangible shadow of a real social phenomenon," she suggests, "her closet dramas are the Artaudian double of their impotent bases in truth." Rosen reads Irma's brothel as "a metaphysical construct in a discussion play about the value of mimetic ritual, the transcendence possible in play, and the magical efficacy of the theater itself"; it is "more than a naturalistically ordered stage brothel; it is more than real; it expresses conflicting ideas with the erotic nuances of a dream." In line with Genet's interest in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Rosen aligns the development of Irma's relationship to the audience with the mythic narrative of Dionysos toying with Pentheus in Euripides' tragedy The Bacchae (405 BCE). In contrast to Goldmann's analysis of the play as an epic defamiliarisation of the historical rise of technocracy, Rosen sees The Balcony as a theatre of cruelty staging of "a mythic dimension to the dark side of the human soul." Like Goldmann, J. L. Styan, too, detects the influence of Brechtian defamiliarisation in the play, which he reads as a "political examination of how man chooses his role in society." Styan argues that—despite the symbolism of evil and the sensational, emotionally disturbing staging of the secret desires of its audience—there is in Genet's theatre "a sharp intellectual edge, a shocking clear-headedness" that "links him more with Pirandello than with Artaud."
Genet's theatre, the editors of Jean Genet: Performance and Politics argue, stages an interrogation and deconstruction of "the value and status of the theatrical frame itself." Postmodern performance, though, provides the most appropriate frame of reference for understanding it, they suggest. They observe that, in common with his other late dramas, The Blacks (1959) and The Screens (1964), The Balcony's exploration of explosive political issues appears to contradict its author's calls for a "non-historical, mythical stage." They interpret The Balcony as an examination of "how revolutions are appropriated through mass-media manipulation." Taking their cue from Genet's note on the play from 1960, they conclude that Genet felt that "conventional political theatre too often indulges the spectator by depicting the revolution as having already happened. Instead of encouraging the audience to change the world, it acts as a safety valve, and thus works to support the status quo." His is a form of political theatre that is "neither didactic nor based on realism"; instead, it fuses the metaphysical or sacred and the political and constitutes the most successful articulation to date of "post-modernist performance and Brechtian critical theatre." It "shows us that performance is not divorced from reality," they suggest, but rather that it is "productive of reality."
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