Word: genet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Common Room, Tynan ranged, on request, all over the theatrical map. Discussing playwrights unjustly neglected on the commercial stage, he nominated Brecht first of all, added Ibsen, Pirandello and Wedekind, and commented that "Giraudoux has been not neglected, but so often misinterpreted that it's worse than neglect." Jean Genet to Tynan is "a natural, who shouldn't be imitated... He's a bad model but an interesting artist"; Eugene Ionesco is "bright as a button, but he's not a messiah of the drama...
...Guard). The fourth actor is Harold Scott '57, and his Maurice is brilliant or very near it. Even allowing for his substantial growth as an artist since he first played the part, his performance is evidence that the best Harvard acting is easily at home on the professional stage. Genet has endowed Maurice with a characteristic movement repeated several times: "Maurice flicks his head as if tossing back from his forehead an exasperating lock of hair." Scott's version of this movement lacks a certain pungency, lacks the sense that it is a summary of all that is annoying, feline...
...backwards in time" to avoid having committed his crime, it is hard to think of any actor and director who would be capable of it.) But Scott, with his mobile, graceful body, his vaguely West Indian accent, his bland, venomous drawl, has combined his own imagination with Genet's, and made a new creation...
Perhaps the imaginations of actor and author are not perfectly harmonious. Genet has directed that his dialogue be pronounced "with the characteristic deformations that go with the accent of the slums." Perhaps he would prefer the Hoboken accents affected by Morrow and Maharis to the not incongruous, but certainly piquant and different, pronunciation that Scott employs. On the other hand, Hoboken English is ugly, as perhaps the accent of the French slums is not. Certainly the former seems unworthy of the vivid vigor of Genet's purple passages: "Snowball's a well-built guy. If you like...
Like most every corridor we pursue into Genet's devious, intriguing mind, this one brings us up against a solid stone question mark. Every statement, perhaps, that can be made about Deathwatch can be convincingly refuted by following up a different train of hints. But then, J.-P. Sartre calls Genet a black magician, and it is no wonder we are unsure how his spells should be pronounced, or what spirits they are intended to call up. All that is certain is that the spell is most strangely and subtly effective