Sargeant played Irma, Freda Foh Shen played Carmen, Sharon Washington played the Envoy, and Will Rhys played the Chief of Police, while Paul Wonsek designed the sets and lighting. The Jean Cocteau Repertory company produced the play at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York in 1999. Eve Adamson directed and designed the lighting, while Robert Klingelhoffer designed the sets. Elise Stone played Irma, Craig Smith played the Chief of Police, and Jason Crowl played the Envoy. 2000s Sébastien Rajon directed the play at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris, opening on 11 May 2005. Patrick Burnier designed the sets and Michel Fau played Irma, Frédéric Jessau played the Chief of Police, Xavier Couleau played the Envoy, and Marjorie de Larquier played Carmen. The director performed the role of the slave. Audiobook An audiobook of the production with Patrick Magee, Cyril Cusack and Pamela Brown was recorded as an LP by conductor Howard Sackler and released by Caedmon Records in 1967. Analysis and criticism The philosopher Lucien Goldmann suggests that the themes of The Balcony may be divided between those that are essential and primary and those that are non-essential and secondary. Those that we may recognise from Genet's earlier work—the double, the mirror, sexuality, dream-death vs. reality-impure life—belong to the secondary level, he argues, while the play's essential theme is a clear and comprehensible analysis of the transformation of industrial society into a technocracy. Genet relates the experiences of his characters "to the great political and social upheavals of the twentieth century," Goldmann argues, particularly important among which is "the collapse of the tremendous hopes for revolution." He discerns in the play's dramatic structure a balance of three equal movements—"established order, threat to order, and order again re-established." The first section of the play dramatises the way in which the prestigious images of the established order—the Bishop, the Judge, the General—belie the actual bearers of power in modern society: Irma and the Chief of Police "possess the real power," Goldmann points out; they "represent the two essential aspects of technocracy: the organization of an enterprise and the power of the State." Consequently, the Chief of Police's dilemma dramatises the historical process of "the growth in prestige of the technicians of repression in the consciousness of the great masses of people." The subject of the play is the transformation by means of which "the Chief of Police comes to be