Robert Wilson / Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe

When Jean Genet was commissioned to write a play for black actors in 1948, he knew little of the African continent. However, the French author did know all about humiliation. He had spent his childhood in care-homes and ended up in a juvenile detention centre at the age of ten. Throughout his life he remained an outcast. The inspiration for ‘Les Nègres’ was a music box, built in the eighteenth century, in which four black pages kneeled before a white porcelain princess, and Genet imagined how it would be if he changed around the skin colour of these figures. ‘Les Nègres’ became an almost clownish play in which all is artifice and pretext. Which is precisely what the director Robert Wilson wanted!

In ‘Les Nègres’, again a coproduction by deSingel, the American theatre-maker started with thirteen actors of African origin and a saxophonist. On the basis of his architectural designs, he shaped a highly theatrical aesthetic and visual reality. Not least through his ingenious lighting, Wilson gave Genet’s wayward poetry a theatrical extension.