In [Les Nègres] the characters are masks, they exist as appearance only, and the black skin of the negroes is as much a mask as the grotesque white masks of the actors who mirror us, the white audience, and our society; the dramatic action is presented as performance, and the ritual qualities of this performance are emphasized by incantations, chanting and dancing as well as by echoes of rituals which are central to our christian civilisation: the litanie des blèmes, the music of the dies irae chanted at the time of the ritual murder, etc. (p. 51)

The printed edition of Genet's play is prefaced by the following note:…

One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his colour?

This most accurately sums up the whole tone of the play, for Genet has taken the "colour" or "race" problem, and has used it as an image for an even wider theme. As he presents it, all identity is a matter of mirror reflections, you define yourself in relation to other people, you know who you are through the reflection of yourself that you see in other people's attitudes to you. This means that personal identity becomes very much a social question, intimately concerned with the power structure of society and with relations of dominance and submission.

The blacks see themselves as defined by their colour; as Neige says,… "My colour! Why, you're my very self!"… They have no separate, individual identity for the whites but are first and foremost black … and so they accept the definition and even reinforce it to emphasise their identity: at the beginning of the play, Félicité, the black queen, mother of the black race, ceremonially blackens the face of Village (the negro who will commit the ritual murder of the white woman). (p. 52)

[The] one thing that [the blacks] can do, is to ensure that the image in which they as individuals have been drowned, is one which will terrify their white creators…. Hence the ritual murder of the white woman, the systematic reversal of all white values, the glorification of hatred and ugliness.

We are confronted, then, with two groups: the dominant, grotesque whites on their raised platform, spectators like us, and the subservient blacks, performing for their masters, acting out the horrible role allotted to them by the whites, committing murder…. Genet shows us that the dominance of the whites is only apparent: they are spectators, not performers, and so are in fact on the receiving end. When the white Queen finally confronts Félicité in the jungle, she realizes that they are Blacks (that is to say, not the niggers of white invention, but something else, not a mere opposition to white, but something positive…. As Félicité puts it:

… we were Darkness in person. Not the darkness which is absence of light, but the kindly and terrible Mother who contains light and deeds….

So the whites depend for their identity on the blacks, just as much as vice versa, and in this way Genet carries his theme beyond the social implications of the central images, and raises questions about reality and identity as such. (p. 53)

Genet … uses singing throughout Les Negres: the play begins and ends with the incongruous dignity of a Mozart minuet, there is the recitative as they smoke around the corpse, the lullaby as they reject Diouf, the elemental tribal rhythms of the dance after the whites are massacred, and the echoes of the christian mass…. In all of these instances, Genet is drawing attention to the performance as performance and to the ritual qualities of the play (both of which are important thematically), and at the same time playing on various incongruities, contrasts and oppositions that continually emphasize the duality which is clearly such an important part of the central image. (pp. 57-8)

Genet has his pseudo-white audience on stage, facing the real white audience in the auditorium, thus forcing the spectators to be aware of themselves, both as spectators and as whites, in the spectacle of the grotesque, distorting mirror that faces them, and … drawing attention to the simultaneous existence of stage and auditorium. (p. 58)

In Les Nègres, the curtain is drawn to reveal what is apparently a coffin, draped with a white cloth and covered with flowers. This coffin is the central focus of all the action, the body of the murdered white woman is present, as they prepare to re-enact the murder and be judged for it. When judgement is about to be pronounced, it is revealed that the coffin is not a coffin at all, and that the cloth covers only two chairs, chairs that really belong to the Valet and the Bishop, and that they have been complaining about throughout the play. This lends visual reinforcement to the idea that the whites are dependent for their identity on the blacks, and if the blacks do not play the game, then they, the whites, risk begin swallowed up in a gulf of nothingness…. The two chairs become a kind of visible scandal, an insolent reminder that power is also powerlessness, that everything contains its opposite, a reminder also of the nothingness, "le vide," that threatens all appearance. At the end of the play, Ville de St. Nazaire, significantly the one who has been the link with the off-stage trial, the "real" trial, comes on with another coffin, and the set up is as it was in the beginning, and the minuet starts again. But this time we know that the coffin is not just a cloth draped over two chairs, for we have seen the box carried in, but our faith in reality has been so undermined that we hesitate to claim it as a real coffin. The fact that it is Ville de St. Nazaire who brings it in, adds further ambiguities: he is the one who may be expected to have access to a corpse (as there has been an execution off stage), but the body will be that of a negro traitor, not a white woman; however, the white victim of the performance is played by Diouf, the black considered by the others to be a traitor, because of his acceptance of white religion. And so we go round and round again, led on by Genet in this way, too, to discover only layer upon layer of appearance or illusion or performance instead of the truth or reality we seek. (pp. 60-1)

In Les Nègres the blacks have a certain individual reality, their off-stage existence, as prostitute, curate, etc., has some bearing on the part they play in the performance and on their attitude to it; however, we are not presented with individuals, and the whole message of the play is that their real off-stage reality is their blackness, this is what defines them and denies them individual existence. (p. 61)

[Les Nègres uses the device of the play within the play] intensively, and indeed it is central to the whole action: the blacks perform for the pseudo-whites on stage, but all are performing for another audience, not physically represented on stage, so as to mask the fact that there is a real trial going on elsewhere, and of course the implications are there for the "real" white audience, sitting there and being entertained (or distracted) by the real black actors…. Performance within performance, audience within audience, play within play—all these are images of the multiple levels of reality or appearance that Genet is concerned with, and his play is structured in such a way that all the levels of performance cut into one another, undermine one another, and together undermine the whole concept of reality. (p. 63)