Genet's plays, like Pirandello's, have become a treasure house for the rococo critical imagination. As the visitor basks in the heady atmosphere—the mirrors, the screens, masks, grandiose costumes and cothurni, the role-playing, verbal efflorescence, and paradoxes—he burbles about the undecipherable nature of levels, dimensions, contexts, multiple images, loci, ritualism, and infinities of reflections….

Genet takes for granted [in The Balcony the] confusion between sexual and social obsessions. In the brothel's studios the devotees abandon themselves to sexual consecration; the house of pleasure is a house of worship. In it each man finds a contrary, double satisfaction: he acquires a feeling of potency from the clothes and the role he puts on; at the same time he abases himself in that role. Or rather, he abases the role and its clothing in order that it may serve his sexual satisfaction. There is then an element of masochism in each of the aberrants' personalities….

From the first Genet intermingles sexual and religious ceremonies. Scene One sets the tone by introducing us to the Bishop in a studio set that represents a sacristy. He wears robes of exaggerated size so that he looks larger than human, like a principal in a Greek tragedy. (p. 268)

Now, although we are led to believe that this Bishop is played by a gas man, we never see the gas man, only the Bishop. There may be a gas man in the story but there is none in the action; and if a gas man in Bishop's apparel differs dramatically from a bishop in bishop's apparel, Genet declines to show us the difference; if we insist that this is a gas man metaphorically wearing a bishop's mask, that mask then has the same lineaments as the face behind it—or else it is transparent—or else it is not a mask any longer but has become a face….

[The other patrons of the brothel] seem to don roles the way some tribesmen assume charms, as a plea to heaven for virility and safety. But Genet shows us only the roles. These roles are the characters. (p. 269)

In [Pirandello's] Six Characters in Search of an Author, the six characters are actually in search of an audience. An author may dream up the Father, but it takes a spectator to recognize him as that character….

Genet introduces something like this reciprocity into the action of The Balcony. To be the Bishop, the character needs an "opposite," a penitent, somebody who will confess to him and whose sins he will absolve, somebody who will certify him as the Bishop…. But if the function of the opposites is to take the kinkies seriously and attribute roles to them, the girls seem unable to take themselves seriously as opposites. They keep breaking out of their parts and virtually winking at the audience: in the Judge's scene the Executioner does "exchange a wink with the Thief." These girls are never anything but whores.

Later in the play the opposites become dispensable. When the Envoy asks the kinkies to drive through the city in a coach as the "real" Bishop, Attorney-General, and General, they feel nervous about abandoning their brothel scenarios and translating themselves from private images in Irma's studios into public images in the world at large…. When their public performance begins, the only doubt that arises is whether they will sustain their parts convincingly or look like kinkies.

At this point, in the absence of the brothel girls, the task of being a collective "opposite" or role-confirmer falls to the general public. We do not see this public, but we do learn subsequently that it accepted the Bishop, Judge, and General for real, without question. Possibly the public was blinded by the "gold and glitter" that surrounded the dignitaries. In any event, it responded favorably; it threw flowers and cheers at them; it even blew them kisses. And why not? We, the other "general public," have already attributed these roles to the kinkies; to us they have become what they pretended to be. (p. 270)

Irma is another case in point. The Envoy asks her to stand in for the missing queen…. Irma is not impersonating the queen, but extending her own personality. She is playing herself, and the Envoy, who later says she made a first-rate queen, functions as her opposite. As though to underscore this conclusion, at a certain point in the text Genet drops her name and starts calling her the Queen; it is the most natural thing in the world for this procuress to assume royalty.

What does Genet mean by this demonstration? That life is all pretext, appearances, theatre? I think he is driving us toward a narrower, sharper, and more satirical conclusion: bishops, judges, and generals are kinkies; queens are procuresses; opposites (the public) who take these figures at their dressed-up value and serve them are whores: revolutionary slogans and symbols (Chantal) are whore-mongering.

Genet likens this state of affairs to the performance of a play. But Irma's much-quoted final speech, which compares her brothel with a theatre, has been frequently misunderstood:

In a little while, I'll have to start all over again … put all the lights on again … dress up…. (A cock crows) Dress up … ah, the disguises! Distribute roles again … assume my own…. (She stops in the middle of the stage, facing the audience.)… Prepare yours … judges, generals, bishops, chamberlains, rebels who allow the revolt to congeal, I'm going to prepare my costumes and studios for tomorrow … You must now go home, where everything—you can be quite sure—will be even falser than here….

She is not saying that life is less "real" than Genet's theatre (or her brothel) is. To claim this on his behalf would be to deprive the play of its application to life. She is insisting that there are more disguises and pretense in life than in the theatre, and that in life the disguises are harder to discern. A play can show us, more clearly than a scrutiny of life can, what life is really about. It can reveal kinks and shams for what they are. It can do a sorting job, bring life into focus. It can make us laugh at these characters … until we realize that we are laughing at ourselves. For if we have accepted what the play says, we are the people who make bishops, judges, and generals out of kinkies, and queens out of whore-mistresses.

Most of the criticism of The Balcony fastens on to other aspects of it, in particular the rituals, disguises, and mirrors, which are constantly held up as prima-facie evidence of Genet's contempt for reality: his masks beneath masks, reflections within reflections, screens behind screens, and other infinite recessions. (pp. 271-72)

What is a ritual? It is a prearranged ceremony. A church service is a ritual; so is a public parade. They go according to form, according to plan. There are no serious hitches, no divergences from the timetable or program. If a horse in a parade kicks an onlooker or if one of the ceremonial figures passes out, that part of the ritual resembles theatre. But ritual is the opposite of theatre, just as the girl who plays the Penitent is the opposite of the Bishop. She defines him, and ritual defines theatre; it marks one of theatre's boundaries by being what theatre is not: predictable, self-contained, formal. (p. 272)

[The screens, disguises and mirrors] are part of a device that Genet uses theatrically, not ritualistically. And far from telling us that nothing is real, they tell us that in the brothel, as in the playhouse, everything is adaptable….

Irma thoughtfully provides a mirror for each studio. The Bishop gazes into his and is smitten with his image…. Up to now he has not tasted the power of being a bishop; he uses the image in the mirror for erotic stimulation, yet even as he does he appeases his power-lust by profaning the robes and "destroying" their "function."

The Judge, too, has a mirror available to him, but does not use it. Instead he looks at beefy Arthur, the male whore, and talks lovingly to him as though to an idealized version of himself, heavy wtih tangible musculature…. (p. 273)

The mirror in the General's studio has the same purpose again. Admiring his image in it, the General sees shining back at him an historical validation: he is the hero of Austerlitz, Napoleon vanquishing the Austrians…. As in the two previous scenes, the kinky loves his image in the mirror because what he sees there is himself transfigured.

As an element in the stage design, the mirrors have a further purpose, suspense. Each one is angled to reflect to the audience part of Irma's room. We will not see that room until Scene Five, but the mirrors forecast it. They alert us to Irma's omnipresence as the brothel's grandmistress, and they hint at the immensity of the premises. (pp. 273-74)

By reflecting the studios and Irma's room to each other, they enlarge the brothel and unify the scenes. They also enlarge the studios: mirrors make a room look artificially bigger.

Genet's language serves as another means of enlargement and ratification. The Bishop says, "We must use words that magnify." And most of the characters do. Their speeches move effortlessly out of conversation and into clusters and imagery. Genet sometimes handles images the way a writer like Shaw handles logic, with comic hyperbole. By exalting the dialogue, raising it beyond simple meanings, he frees it from the constraints of everyday banter and attains a language that can cope with complicated states of consciousness. (p. 274)

The brothel … seems to resemble a vast, rotating movie lot with the sound stages distributed around the hub of Irma's office. Genet does not provide a full list of the studios, but if we visualize each one as a miniature of some activity outside the theatre and brothel, the brothel is a miniature of society as a whole. The mirrors in each scene reflect the world to itself. (p. 275)

As a satire of society, The Balcony laughs at men in authority as they seek for images of themselves that they can love. It laughs more bitterly at men without authority who defer to those images (attribute them) and even worship them. Both groups are taking part in a game. X names himself a judge or bishop or general. He drapes himself in an awesome outfit, grows confident from the feeling of being dressed up and from the sight of his magnified reflection, and so enlarges himself artificially in the eyes of other men. His old self or personality fades away.

These games are what gives the play its unity of tone, games such as I'll-be-bishop-and-you-be-penitent. But they are games played in earnest; games propelled by desperate intentions; games that are liable, because of their peculiarities, to invoke the unexpected; games of life and death.

Now, games are play and the gerund playing has two principal meanings: it means enjoyment, as in a house of pleasure; it also means mimesis…. The Bishop begins by masturbating or "playing" with himself; he ends by wishing to play with other men's lives, to move them about like pieces: "Instead of blessing and blessing and blessing until I've had my fill, I'm going to sign decrees and appoint priests." (p. 276)

Theatre, as an arena for games, plays by heightening its effects. In his playhouse-brothel Genet takes this heightening to a personal extreme. He pours into his drama a sumptuous language, bulks out his conceptually big characters with padded costumes; and seizes other theatrical opportunities, such as keeping visible that token of the post-Renaissance, indoor theatre, the chandelier.

As part of the heightening procedure he plants contradictions in the characters' desires: they feel pulled between playing games of sex (the mastery of themselves) and games of authority (the mastery of others). Genet marries the contradictions, without trying to resolve them, in an ingenious way: he implies that power over oneself and power over others can be achieved simultaneously by playing games of death.

In the early scenes he seems to show us the brothel as a theatricalization of life, of real life, with a real bishop, judge, and general giving rein to their all-too-real kinks in order to live at the top of their bent. But there are plenty of hints that death is a more attractive game for them to play than life is….

At last it is the turn of the gaudiest character in The Balcony to play the game of death. He is the Police Chief, Georges by name, the ultimate provenience of power in the state. (p. 277)

Genet's exquisite irony intensifies. Georges decides that his ideal memorial, his death-in-life, would be for somebody to impersonate him in the brothel. While the impersonator mimics him, he will mimic death by disappearing to "wait out the regulation two thousand years," the equivalent of the Christian era. The two millennia will sanctify him, much as the Church (the Bishop), the Law (the Judge), and the Military (the General) have been sanctified by the two millennia since the death of Christ and the decline of Rome. He will, we assume, mimic resurrection too when he feels like it, and re-emerge as top dog in the state. (pp. 277-78)

Fortunately for Georges, Roger the defeated revolutionary comes into the brothel expressly to impersonate him. No sooner is he inside a studio (which is got up to look like a mausoleum) than Roger is awarded his "opposite," a slave, to attribute to him the role of Police Chief. But Roger is still secretly a rebel. And in him the revolution twitches its final, futile defiance.

He ends his scenario by making "the gesture of castrating himself." With this gesture he hopes to mutilate the image of the Police Chief as a man of power…. For the purposes of the play, he is dead. And his gesture has gone awry. Trying to discredit Georges, he has succeeded only in becoming Georges' opposite, an impotent, and in confirming Georges. (p. 278)

Georges, Genet's most savage portrait in the play, is so unmanned that he cannot play out his own fantasies. He must wait until somebody does the job for him by proxy—anybody, no matter who, an avowed revolutionary if necessary—just so long as he does not get hurt. Now he can go into his two-thousand-year hibernation. A studio has been prepared. It is a mocked-up replica of a tremendous piece of architecture still in the planning stage. It incorporates law courts, opera houses, railroad stations, pagodas, monuments…. But this edifice is no less than a magnification of the brothel, right down to the mirrors. Like the brothel, a floating balcony, it will "sail in the sky" on top of its mountains. Here Georges's image will live on with its wound, while he plays the game of death in a brothel mausoleum. The image will evoke the images we retain of other symbolically castrated heroes: the shorn Samson, the blinded Oedipus, Philoctetes and his rotting foot, Christ crucified.

A magnified image in a magnified brothel. So much, says Genet, for your saints and heroes. (pp. 278-79)

Albert Bermel, "Society as a Brothel: Genet's Satire in 'The Balcony'," in Modern Drama (copyright © 1976, University of Toronto, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama; with the permission of Modern Drama), September, 1976, pp. 265-80.