Hmm . . . I really like what Genet was trying to do here, but I'm not sure that it is pulled off as well as it could have been. This play is very much postmodern, and in that sense it reminded me a lot of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in terms of style and themes. Like Genet (and also like the Frankfurt School sociologists, with their emphasis on Freud's death instinct/Eros v. Thanatos and the Marquis de Sade, with whom Genet is often compared), Pynchon also equated the appetite for power with sado-masochism; and ultimately the love of power is linked not only to sexual depravity but to a love of Death.
In Genet's play the main action takes place in a brothel in which the players are really putting on a performance, each taking on a role equated with power in society (Each power figure appears in the play, according to the scene notes, as "larger than life"), while a revolution is going on outside the brothel walls. Each player acts out his role accordingly: the Bishop demands that one sins so that he can offer forgiveness, the Judge demands that one breaks the law so he can hand down a sentence, the Executioner carries out the judge's sentences. And the same goes for the General, the Chief of Police, etc. -- each playing his part.
In terms of style, Genet (with this play in particular) has also often been compared to Bertolt Brecht. And this is certainly understandable, as there are many stylistic similarities and as Genet, like Brecht, is concerned here with critically exploring broad social problems, representing them not realistically, but as some representation thereof, something that Genet makes plain throughout as his characters often refer to themselves as wearing "masks," as being "statues," "images," etc.
And the play also reminded me more in its thematic content (but also to some degree stylistically) of Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour. And, of course, the work was also redolent of the brothel scenes in later volumes of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
In all, stylistically what Genet was doing here had been done before and thematically there was also a precedent, and other artists have since dealt with similar style and themes more successfully. I always think when reading a translated work that perhaps my lack of enthusiasm (or alternatively my love for the work) is owed more to the translation than to the work itself. And this may well be the case. This is the first work of Genet's that I've read, and I think I will at least read his debut novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, before reaching any conclusions about Genet's work overall. And my opinions of that work will likely determine whether or not I'd be interested in reading any more Genet thereafter. At this point I'm just not sold.