Tragedy, Genet and The Maids

Extract

The Maids, produced for the first time in 1946 by Louis Jouvet at the Thèâtre de l'Athènèe, marks perhaps the beginning of “anti-theatre” in France. Certainly we are aware for the first time in The Maids of a strange new consciousness of theatre as in the same year Nathalie Sarraute in Portrait of a Man Unknown made us aware of a new concept of the novel. Sartre wrote of Nathalie Sarraute's “anti-novel”: “We live in an age of reflection and the novel is in process of reflecting on itself.” One might say with equal validity of Genet that his plays are theatre reflecting on the nature of theatre. It is this fact that makes his plays difficult to understand in any normal sense of the word. Nor are his plays “theatre within theatre” as Hamlet contains a play within a play.