The reverence paid to Jean Genet’s overwrought 1947 play, in which two sisters in service role-play the murder of their awful mistress, always baffled me. In Australian auteur Kip Williams’s version, adapted and updated to a world of Instagram followers and filters, and running a high-octane 100 minutes, I finally got it.
This is a hectic, shouty psychodrama which barrages the audience with emotion and imagery. The maids perform for their phones, the footage augmented and blown up on a rear-stage bank of floor-to-ceiling mirrored wardrobes.
Williams draws powerful and intricately precise performances from a magnetic Lydia Wilson and relative newcomers Phia (House of the Dragon) Saban and Yerin (Bridgerton) Ha. Overblown flower arrangements and wacky couture spill across Rosanna Vize’s set of luxe-moderne white shagpile and silk bedding. It is, frankly, a lot. I kind of loved it.
Genet, born in 1910, was a member of the underclass and a criminal, expelled from the Foreign Legion for homosexuality but championed by Sartre, Cocteau and Picasso. In The Maids you can see a powerful expression of his outcast status and a reaction to both Sartre’s lofty existentialism and Cocteau’s prettified fantasies.
Here, exclusion and inequality are felt on a visceral level. There’s a grimy fascination with sex and other bodily functions, and a hint of incest between the sisters. They live lives of drudgeish servility but the it-girl-influencer whirl of fashion shows, parties, Ozempic and mindfulness that the monstrous “Madame” inhabits is arguably worse. The distillation of Williams’s take on Genet is a drooling mouth spitting on a bootylicious scarlet Schiaparelli gown.
It's all about the roles we play and the appearance we put on for the world, hence the mirrors and the face-distorting phone filters. We first glimpse Claire (Wilson), preening in cerise lingerie and bossing the frantically attentive Solange (Saban), behind diaphanous curtains. As the drapes draw back we realise this is a ritualised power game the two maids indulge in, like naughty children, when Madame is out.
The line between fantasy and reality is blurred: the two even confuse their own identities. But the role-play slides sickeningly into the real world. Claire has shopped Madame’s horrible boyfriend to the police for embezzlement (but not before Solange has stashed his dick pics on her phone). They plan to put a huge dose of phenobarbital in her tea. “We’re finally gonna kill Madame!” Claire records herself saying. “Don’t come for me in the comments.”
In Genet’s script, Madame’s vulgarity is signaled by the fact she can’t pronounce ‘chamomile’. In Williams’s version the language is less decorous. These women get “the ick” or are “dripping with desire”. Described as a “disgusting, pig-faced c***”, one of the maids takes issue only with the epithet “pig-faced”.
Yerin Ha’s Madame blows through the middle of the play like a capricious cyclone, alternately indulging and excoriating her servants, bestowing items from her absurd wardrobe then snatching them back. Her raging stream of consciousness is studded with four letter words, particularly “like” and “f*ck”. She demeans with pet names – “Solangebob Squarepants” – and offhand insults.
The performances are a marvel of speed, focus and technical adroitness. Most of the action has to be mediated not only for its up-close live impact but how it will play out on the footage projected behind. Towards the end, live and recorded imagery layer together as Saban’s Solange recites a babblingly ecstatic monologue while Wilson’s Claire pounds a treadmill in metallic wig and designer gown.
The phone-based tricksiness will be familiar to anyone who saw Williams’s extraordinary Picture of Dorian Gray with Succession’s Sarah Snook last year. It works beautifully here too but will surely show diminishing returns if it’s his main tool in rebooting classics. This show demands a strong reaction, and I imagine as many will hate it as love it. But if you’re prepared to surrender, it’s a wild ride.
To 29 Nov, donmarwarehouse.com.
