METATHEATER
327
reality of the world is mortally affected, illusion becomes insep–
arable from reality.
Life is a Dream
is the title of Calder6n's great–
est play, and Shakespeare's theater terminates with the famous:
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on." The point I am
making here is that these phrases are not chance expressions by
Calder6n and Shakespeare, but fundamental concepts of the
dramatic form which they initiated.
In the metaplay there will always be a fantastic element. For
in this kind of play fantasy is essential, it is what one finds at
the heart of reality. In fact, one could say that the metaplay
is
to
ordinary fantasy as tragedy is to melodrama.
As
in tragedy the
misfortunes of the hero must be necessary and not accidental, so
in the metaplay life
must
be a dream and the
world
must be a
stage.
All this would have by now been much clearer if it had not
been for the appearance
in
the nineteenth century of a very
great dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, who tried to give to the realistic
play a necessitarian structure like that found in Greek tragedy,
and this without sharing the premises of either Sophocles or
Aeschylus, Ibsen's own view of the world being actually closer
to Shakespeare's and Calder6n's.
As
a result, a wrong belief was
propagated- it dominated the stage for more than fifty years–
that without the Greek metaphysic the form of tragedy was pos–
sible and valid. Now if this view was never formally challenged,
its inadequacy was felt by the best playwrights of the present
century. Their plays, in the main, are metaplays. Among them is
Jean Genet.
II
The Balcony
is a brothel whose clients arrived equipped, in
Madame Irma's phrase, "each with his own scenario." Surely this
identifies the drama as a metaplay. Among the clients are three
more or less nondescript persons, one of whom wants to drama-
tize himself as a bishop, one as a judge, one as a general. The
prostitutes assigned to these men play up their illusions of great-
ness, degrading them in certain instances, just to make the act
seem more real. The Grand Balcony is, indeed, "a palace of
illusions." For the clients are fitted out with costumes appropriate
