The Maids is a bit of a nude girl in a fur coat: layers of marvellous frou-frou with nothing totally startling underneath. Jean Genet based his play on a real murder, in which two servant sisters hacked their mistress to death, but turned it into the least naturalistic of dramas.
It opens with the two sibs fantasising about being mistress and killer maid, though, unless you're a devotee, you won't know this is a masquerade until the Grande Dame - an upper-class creature so florid that she could be a man in drag - sweeps in. The fantasy is rehearsed again and again: it's hard to miss the points Genet is making about power, class and illusion, and, since no one is ever entirely being themselves, the play can also indulge bad acting. You can never blame anyone for seeming artificial in a play which shows actors making themselves into traditional females with frocks and tantrums and slap.
The sisters have been acted by men, and represented as centaurs. Neil Bartlett's production, in his own new translation, introduces a different twist: the three actors know all the parts, and switch between them from night to night. This is totally in tune with the play, and shines a light on the arbitrariness of most casting. The night I saw it, Hayley Carmichael was all fluid insouciance as the elder sister, and Kathryn Hunter, dark and scrunched-up as her sister. Geraldine Alexander played the mistress like a blank and scarey mannequin, in a doll-like wig.
Aptly mixing the harsh and the voluptuous, Bartlett and his designer Jonathan Swain have made a bower in a concrete bunker. Above the garage of the Old Ship Hotel, the scenes are played on a floor covered in rose petals and upturned crimson chandeliers with a backdrop of furs, satins and glittery gowns. It's wonderfully suggestive, not so wonderfully significant.
This year's Brighton Festival is not so much site-specific as ingeniously scattered throughout the city, with few dramas being performed in theatres. Hydrocracker have tellingly brought together a number of short Pinter plays and positioned them in different parts of the handsome Town Hall, so that The New World Order - a man bullied by a torturer, a women crouching in a cell, a child gloatingly manipulated by a killer - is set in an old-world architecture of oak and honours boards and a dank basement. As so often with Pinter, the plays have shifted and darkened their meaning over time: what once looked far away now looks much nearer home.
Directed by Declan Donnellan, the Maly Theatre's production of The Three Sisters at London's Barbican is - and you feel it even through Russian and surtitles - a deep, rich rendering of the play. Far from being bowed down by yearning, the sisters begin as angry and boisterous. When desolation strikes, it is the more bitter - Nelly Uvarova's Irina manages to make 'Moscow' sound like three different kinds of illness - but also inevitable. Throughout the play, lovers whisper to each other over huge dusky spaces - as if Mother Russia was determined to shoulder her way between them.
The silver birches of Turkey transform the Arcola - the audiences pick their way through a beautiful forest to their seats - for Leyla Nazli's first play: both tantalising and confusing as it crams into a tiny space Communist rebels, family deaths, herds on the mountains, love among the maidens. Silver Birch House is the start of an Orient Express Season, which will bring the Turkey of the theatre's founders to the Dalston area with its large Turkish and Kurdish population. Another first for the seven-year-old stage perched in an old textile factory.
