Jean Genet

Jean Genethas emerged in recent years as a key figure in defining and understanding twentieth-century theatre. This timely book, the only introductory text to Genet in English, offers an overview of this influential and controversial writer whose work prefigured many recent postmodern and post-colonial developments in theatre and performance studies. Reflecting not only on key plays and productions from the French playwright but on his early life and later political activism, David Bradby provides a comprehensive account of a playwright and theorist whose plays caused rioting in his native country, and whose writing both for and beyond the theatre demonstrated a new approach to the relationships between art and life.