Scott Imaginative

His cellmates mutter and shout, struggle and writhe, and they carry conviction. (If Maharis and his director are unequal to the titanic movement of the "dance which shows Green Eyes trying to go backwards in time" to avoid having committed his crime, it is hard to think of any actor and director who would be capable of it.) But Scott, with his mobile, graceful body, his vaguely West Indian accent, his bland, venomous drawl, has combined his own imagination with Genet's, and made a new creation.

"...accent of the slums"

Perhaps the imaginations of actor and author are not perfectly harmonious. Genet has directed that his dialogue be pronounced "with the characteristic deformations that go with the accent of the slums." Perhaps he would prefer the Hoboken accents affected by Morrow and Maharis to the not incongruous, but certainly piquant and different, pronunciation that Scott employs. On the other hand, Hoboken English is ugly, as perhaps the accent of the French slums is not. Certainly the former seems unworthy of the vivid vigor of Genet's purple passages: "Snowball's a well-built guy. If you like, he's a Green Eyes with a smokescreen. Green Eyes covered with mud. Green Eyes in the dark..." That's not the way they talk in Hoboken. Genet, however, has no commitment to consistency, and the contrast between the beauty of his lines and the squalor of the accents in which it is spoken might be exactly what he was aiming at. Or it might not.

Black Magic

Like most every corridor we pursue into Genet's devious, intriguing mind, this one brings us up against a solid stone question mark. Every statement, perhaps, that can be made about Deathwatch can be convincingly refuted by following up a different train of hints. But then, J.-P. Sartre calls Genet a black magician, and it is no wonder we are unsure how his spells should be pronounced, or what spirits they are intended to call up. All that is certain is that the spell is most strangely and subtly effective