| has gloss | eng: The Balcony is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Since Peter Zadek directed its first production at the Arts Theatre Club in London in 1957, the play has attracted many of the greatest directors of the 20th century, including Peter Brook, Erwin Piscator, Roger Blin, Giorgio Strehler, and JoAnne Akalaitis. Set in an unnamed city that is experiencing a revolutionary uprising in the streets, most of the action takes place in an upmarket brothel that functions as a microcosm of the regime of the establishment under threat outside. The plays dramatic structure integrates Genets concern with meta-theatricality and role-playing and consists of two central strands: a political conflict between revolution and counter-revolution and a philosophical one between reality and illusion. Genet suggested that the play ought to be performed as a "glorification of the Image and the Reflection." His biographer, Edmund White, writes that with The Balcony, along with The Blacks (1959), Genet re-invented modern theatre. |