The Screens

The Screens (French: Les Paravents) is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Its first few productions all used abridged versions, beginning with its world premiere under Hans Lietzau's direction in Berlin in May 1961. Its first complete performance was staged in in 1964, two years before Roger Blin directed its French premiere in Paris.

Genet began writing the play in 1955 and continued to develop it over the following few years, completing a first version in June 1958. He re-wrote the play further while in Greece towards the end of 1959.Marc Barbezat's company L'Arbalète published it in February 1961, after which Genet re-wrote the play again. In 1976 Genet published a second, revised version, which appears in the French edition of his Complete Works.

The play premièred in an abridged German version in May 1961 at the Schlosspark-Theater in Berlin, which Hans Lietzau directed. A slightly revised version of the problematic German translation used in Berlin was staged by Leon Epp two years later at the Volkstheater in Vienna in 1963. Epp's interpretation emphasised the political conflict between the French and Algerians in the play.

In London in 1964 Peter Brook staged two-thirds of the play (its first twelve scenes, in a performance that lasted for two-and-a-half hours) at the Donmar Rehearsal Rooms as part of his experimental "Theatre of Cruelty" season with the Royal Shakespeare Company; he abandoned plans to stage the complete text, partly due to dissatisfaction with Bernard Frechtman's translation.

The play's first complete performance was directed by Per Verner Carlsson at the Stadsteater in in 1964. Its five-hour-long production required six months of rehearsal preparation.

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