This is Jean Genet’s first play, newly and expertly translated by David Rudkin and vividly directed by Geraldine Alexander. Set in a prison cell, it makes for a clammily powerful 75 minutes, even if I find something suspect about Genet’s elevation of the murderer into a figure of dark glamour.
Genet’s play, written in 1949 and later revised, deals, as Martin Esslin observed in The Theatre of the Absurd, with the hierarchy of crime. Of the three men in the cell, the illiterate prostitute-killer Green-Eyes is the kingpin, while the petty thief Lefranc and the fluttering delinquent Maurice are his jealous and rancorous courtiers. Even these three, however, are subservient to the jail’s unseen star murderer, Snowball. Both Rudkin’s translation and Alexander’s production bring out not just the class structure of the slammer but Genet’s sexualisation of crime: Green-Eyes relives the murder he committed with orgasmic delight and says of his victim: “she was after my lilac blossom”.
But, although the play captures the shifting alliances among the three prisoners, a sense of monotony inevitably creeps in. Alexander does her best to counter this by inserting dream sequences featuring Emma Naomi, who also plays the prison guard, as a fantasy figure. The three prisoners are also very well played. Tom Varey conveys the doomed, muscular authority of Green-Eyes, Danny Lee Wynter as Lefranc suggests a minor hood willing himself to join the ultimate prison elite and Joseph Quinn is all twitching caprice as the minx-like Maurice. The play is well executed but, if you go, don’t miss the accompanying exhibition of prisoners’ artworks, which provides as much insight into incarceration as Genet’s oppressive piece.
- At Print Room at the Coronet, London, until 7 May. Box office: 020-3642 6606.
