The Screens () 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 Stockholm in 1964, two years before Roger Blin directed its French premiere in Paris. Theme Genet was writing the piece as a war of independence was being conducted in French colonial Algeria. The work has no narrative structure, but comprises a series of 17 individual scenes depicting Arab insurrection against a stupid and blundering colonial power. Although the occupying army is not identified as specifically French (nor is the action intended to depict only the then-current insurgence—the French conquest of Algeria in the 1840s is also referenced), when the play was first performed in France, at the eminent Odéon theatre, Paris, in 1966 it was seen as a provocative insult to national prestige and caused serious protest demonstrations. The "screens" of the title are metaphors: in one sense, for example, they stand for on-screen television news reports filtering the realities of war, both political and physical. But they are also real stage properties, mounted on rubber wheels and manipulated, as part of the action, by a visible stagehand. Textual history 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 publishing company L'Arbalète published it in February 1961, after which Genet re-wrote the play again. It was first published in English by Grove Press, New York in 1962 (translated by Bernard Flechtman), with Faber and Faber publishing the UK edition the following year. In 1976, Genet published a second, revised version, which appears in the French edition of his Complete Works. Production history 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 1964 in London, 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