Lionel Abel
METATHEATER
Jean Genet's extraordinary play,
The Balcony,
is most
certainly
not
a piece of avant-garde theater; it
is
not eccentric
or odd; modem, to be sure, it makes no claim to being especially
modernistic. The play is neither peculiar nor perverse; yes,
The
Balcony
is a new play, but it is not unlike some rather old ones;
it is original, but it belongs in a tradition, and that tradition is
none other than the great tradition of western dramaturgy.
The
Balcony
is a metaplay; and the metaplay has occupied the
dramatic imagination of the West to the same degree that the
Greek dramatic imagination was occupied with tragedy.
Let it be said once and for all: Shakespeare and Calderon
did not write tragedies; at least, they did not write good tragedies.
(Shakespeare wrote one great one,
Macbeth;
Calderon, not even
one.) What these playwrights did create was a new type of
drama, one with very different assumptions from those of Greek
tragedy, and with very different effects. Often they produced this
characteristic and new form while intent on writing tragedy. But
Hamlet
and
Life
is
a Dream
are simply not tragedies. They are
metaplays.
I have asked myself: can I be the first one to think of
designating a form which has been in existence for so long a time,
about three hundred years? It is a strange and not undramatic fact
of life that something shiningly individual will continue to be
seen darkly until it has been given a name.
What, then, is the metaplay?
Let us see first why tragedy was not the characteristic form
of the Elizabethan, Spanish or French theater. (It
was
the char–
acteristic form of Jean Racine; but in the seventeenth century he
