Word: genet
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...Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) miscasts Jeanne Moreau, an actress far too frost-free to catch the temper of a frustrated spinster. She brings every subconscious drive boiling to the surface, and her roaring heterosexual readiness makes a parody of the screenplay by France's poet of perversion, Jean Genet...
...leave it; but those who stick around will probably want to amuse themselves by counting phallic symbols. Snakes and falling timber abound, and Mademoiselle's metaphor for the act of love is an ax blade buried in lumber. Xenophobia, pyromania and sundry aberrations are touched upon, while Genet catalogues the destructive power of Woman. On the night before the woodsman is beaten to death by the villagers who suspect him of her crimes, Moreau leads her victim through rainswept meadows in one of the longest and most ludicrous love marathons ever filmed...
...blade is sharpened on a grindstone, Genet has defined himself against society. In a world where many people can scarcely explain what they do, a crime is at least a visible and dramatic act. Genet is the total theatrician in that he revels in making illusion indistinguishable from reality. Are the generals, bishops and judges in the brothel of The Balcony more real when they put on those costumes to gratify their sexual quirks or when they assume the same roles to govern the state? In Genet's drama, costumes not only make the man, they rule the world...
...Like Genet, John Osborne is nauseated by society, but he is less ambiguous and symbolic, more direct and realistic. There is more than a trace of Captain Bligh in him, except that he is both martinet and mutineer. He reads the riot act to his times in the accents of self-hatred. Bill Maitland says, "I myself am more packed with spite and twitching with revenge than anyone I know of. I actually often, frequently, daily want to see people die for their errors. I wish to kill them myself, to throw the switch with my own fist." There...
...implications of recurrent patterns of evil. The electronic rapidity of instantaneous information everywhere makes the plot and story line of the well-made play seem slowpoky. The modern play is all middle like a Happening, all now. Unable to conceive of a destination, it coils endlessly around its theme. Genet's The Blacks begins and ends with identical scenes; so does Ionesco's The Bald Soprano. Almost nothing has happened. There is the suggestion of unalterable and eternal repetitions in human behavior. Pinter does this almost subliminally with poetically repetitive speech patterns...