Jean Genet understood the essence of theatre: everything is always something else. In his plays, illusion and reality seep into one another until it’s impossible to see where one ends and the other begins. Mirrors, doubles and role-playing abound. Home’s revival of The Maids, a tricksy tale of play-acting and dangerous escapism, revels in this theatricality.
Director Lily Sykes’ new production of a translation by Martin Crimp takes its cue from two peripheral statements on the play, each projected on the screen that looms above the stage. The first is a line from Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers – quoted by Jean-Paul Sartre in his introduction to The Maids – in which a character states that if he wrote a play for women he would cast men in the roles. The second is Genet’s characteristically enigmatic remark that “maybe the characters are me, maybe they’re not”.
So here the three female characters are all played by men and the fiction is framed by Genet’s very real experiences of imprisonment. Throughout his adolescence and early adulthood, the writer was in and out of jail across Europe for various petty crimes. In this version of the play, would-be murderers and titular maids Claire and Solange are cast as shimmering facets of Genet’s personality – as is their beloved and despised Mistress, whose jailed lover is also suggested by the identical prison jumpsuits all three actors wear.
The loose prison setting of Ruari Murchison’s design is both a nod to the author and an echo of Claire and Solange’s criminal desires. The sisters escape the boredom and drudgery of domestic service by taking it in turns to impersonate their Mistress, whom they fantasise about killing. But the penal trappings, which quickly slide into the background, are less interesting than Sykes’ exploration of self and performativity. The main auditorium at Home has been radically reconfigured into an in-the-round space, surrounding the characters with their ever-present audience. With male actors in the roles, we can never forget the fakery: these are men pretending to be women, who are pretending to be maids, who are in turn stuck in their own constant cycle of make-believe.
The play becomes a multiplying hall of mirrors, in which the characters are all reflected in one another – as well as reflecting back the figure of the playwright. The construction of the self is a grand performance, with all three actors playfully acknowledging the spectators that encircle them.
Cameras livestream the scenes as they unfold, doubling and tripling the stage images on the screen above, while bursts of recorded applause interrupt Jan Schoewer’s unsettling compositions. As Claire and Solange, Jake Fairbrother and Luke Mullins lend a life-and-death desperation to the sisters’ pretending, as they anxiously prepare to turn game into reality.
Danny Lee Wynter’s Mistress, by contrast, has the privilege of luxuriating in the theatricality, gleefully extending each line and gesture.
As much as the illusion dazzles, it also has a sting of danger. The sharp shifts of Zoe Spurr’s lighting can snap us in a moment from intoxicating, scarlet-drenched fantasy to imminent threat. We know that this is all spectacle, all make-believe, yet somehow it still sets the pulse racing.
There are moments when the containing concept feels unsure of itself, or the accumulating layers of illusion and performance threaten to implode. At its best, though, the show is a queasy but captivating dream from which it’s hard to wake.
At Home, Manchester, until 1 December.
