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6 unusual facts about Jean Genet


Brenda Bruce

She also appeared as Irma in the RSC's production of Jean Genet's The Balcony in 1971.

George Earl Ortman

In 1954, he and actress Julie Bovasso founded the Tempo Playhouse to perform contemporary European playwrights, including the first American showings of Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, and Michel de Ghelderode.

Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate

In 1947 Saroyan's The Beautiful People and O'Neill's SS Glencairn both had their London premières there, as did Genet's The Maids.

Nina Baden-Semper

She has had varied stage roles in dramatic works that range from The Bacchae by Euripides, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière and The Blacks by Jean Genet to modern thrillers such as Wait Until Dark and Stepping Out, as well as comedy roles.

Ronald Hayman

He made his debut as a director with Jean Genet's Deathwatch at the Arts Theatre in 1960 and in 1961 was awarded an ABC Television traineeship, which took him to Northampton for a year as assistant producer.

Violette Leduc

Her first novel L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin) was published by Albert Camus for Éditions Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.


Albert Cossery

During his literary career he became close friend of other writers and artists such as Lawrence Durrell, Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Giacometti.

Barbara Bray

She translated the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert, and work by leading French speaking writers of her own time including Marguerite Duras, Amin Maalouf, Julia Kristeva, Michel Quint, Jean Anouilh, Michel Tournier, Jean Genet, Alain Bosquet, Réjean Ducharme and Philippe Sollers.

Charles Gordone

His acting credits included Brother Jerro in "The Trials of Brother Jerro Bohem," Hickey in "Of Mice and Men," and The Valet in Jean Genet's The Blacks (1961–1966) alongside of James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Cicely Tyson, and many other Black actors who went on to change Hollywood.

Christian Enzensberger

Smut is an experimental work in which dirt is described scientifically, personally and peversely by a panopoly of narrative voices, including fragments from the anthropologist Mary Douglas alongside writers from Samuel Beckett through William S. Burroughs to Jean Genet.

José Quintero

He directed over seventy productions by a great number of writers, including Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, Thornton Wilder, Jean Genet and Brendan Behan.

Kalervo Palsa

His works include clear references to such people as Jean-Paul Sartre, Strindberg and Jean Genet, and many more subtle influences are listed on the first page of Eläkeläinen muistelee, where he mentions such kindred spirits as Jonathan Swift and Vladimir Lenin among many others.

Lunch Poems

“The Day Lady Died” begins, “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday/three days after Bastille day, yes/it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine.” In the poem, he references Paul Verlaine, New World Writing, Brendan Behan, Jean Genet’s plays The Balcony and The Blacks and New York locations like the Golden Griffin and the Ziegfeld Theatre.

Marusya Klimova

She is the author of translations from the French (Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Genet, Pierre Guyotat, Georges Bataille, Monique Wittig, Michel Foucault, Pierre Louÿs, etc.) as well as her own books; she is a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2006).

Mutsuo Takahashi

In fact, many of his collections published from the 1980s onward, include poems either dedicated to or about important authors around the world, including Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Genet, Ezra Pound, and Chimako Tada,—each a homage to an important literary predecessor.

Nico B.

He is also the founder and owner of the infamous Cultvideotheek in Amsterdam and of Cult Epics, a distributor of cult movies in the genres arthouse, horror and erotica, specialized in the work of Walerian Borowczyk, Tinto Brass, Jean Genet, Fernando Arrabal, Rene Daalder, Abel Ferrara, Radley Metzger, Irving Klaw, and Bettie Page.

Oxford Playhouse

The Greek theatre director Minos Volanakis was an associate director at the theatre; his productions included Jean Genet's The Maids (1963–4) and The Balcony (1967), and Jean Giraudoux's Madwoman of Chaillot.

Petr Lébl

Lébl's first theatre direction in the Theatre on the Balustrade, The Maids by Jean Genet, won the second place for the best theatre production in the poll of Czech theatre critics.

Rafael Morais

He's appeared in many theater productions since including Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love, Brian Friel's Lovers, Jean Genet's Deathwatch and Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen.

Theatre of France

Inspired by the theatrical experiments in the early half of the century and by the horrors of the war, the avant-garde Parisian theatre, "New theatre" or, as the critic Martin Esslin termed it, "Theatre of the Absurd," around the writers Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal, refused simple explanations and abandoned traditional characters, plots and staging.


see also

Our Lady of the Flowers

Lindsay Kemp did a production of Flowers. A pantomime for Jean Genet (based on Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet) in 1974 at the Bush Theatre, London; he subsequently toured it in the USA and Australia.

Richard Schechner

With The Performance Group Schechner directed many productions including Dionysus in 69 based on Euripides' The Bacchae (1968), Makbeth based on Shakespeare's Macbeth (1969), Commune group devised piece (1970), Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime (1972), Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (1975), David Gaard's The Marilyn Project (1975), Seneca's Oedipus (1977), Terry Curtis Fox's Cops (1978), and Jean Genet's The Balcony (1979).

Song of Love

A Song of Love (Un chant d'amour), a 1950 film by Jean Genet

The Maid

The Maids (Les Bonnes), a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet