Textual History
The Balcony exists in three distinct versions, published in French in 1956, 1960, and 1962. The first version consists of two acts of fifteen scenes and includes a dream sequence in which Irma's dream of three wounded young men—who personify blood, tears, and sperm—is enacted immediately before Arthur returns to the brothel and is shot abruptly. The second version is the longest and most political. The third version is shorter and reduces the political content of the scene with the café revolutionaries. Bernard Frechtman's first English translation (published in 1958) was based on Genet's second version, while Frechtman's second, revised English translation (published in 1966) was based on Genet's third version. A translation by Barbara Wright and Terry Hands, which the RSC used in its 1987 production, incorporates scenes and elements from all three versions.
Genet wrote the first version of the play between January and September 1955, during which time he also wrote The Blacks and re-worked his screenplay The Penal Colony. Immediately afterwards, in October and November the same year, he wrote Her, a posthumously published one-act play about the Pope, which is related to The Balcony. Genet took his initial inspiration for The Balcony from Franco's Spain, explaining in a 1957 article that:
| “ | My point of departure was situated in Spain, Franco's Spain, and the revolutionary who castrates himself was all those Republicans when they had admitted their defeat. And then my play continued to grow in its own direction and Spain in another. | ” |
Genet was particularly interested at the time in newspaper reports of two projects for massive tombs: the Caudillo's own colossal memorial near Madrid, the Valle de los Caídos ("Valley of the Fallen"), where he was buried in 1975, and the projected mausoleum of Aga Khan III in Aswan, Egypt. They provided the source for the Chief of Police's longing for a great mausoleum and the founding of a funerary cult around him in the play. The meditations on the contrast between Being and Doing that the Bishop articulates in the first scene recall the "two irreducible systems of values" that Jean-Paul Sartre suggested in Saint Genet (1952) Genet "uses simultaneously to think about the world."
Marc Barbezat's company L'Arbalète published the first version of The Balcony in June 1956; the artist Alberto Giacometti created several lithographs based on the play that appeared on its cover (including a tall, dignified Irma, the Bishop who was made to resemble Genet, and the General with his whip). Genet dedicated this version to Pierre Joly, a young actor and Genet's lover at the time. Genet began to re-write the play in late October 1959 and again in May 1960, the latter prompted by its recent production under the direction of Peter Brook. He worked on the third version between April and October 1961, during which time he also read Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), a work of dramatic theory that was to become one of Genet's favourite books and a formative influence on his ideas about the role of myth and ritual in post-realist theatre.
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