Review: THE MAIDS, Jermyn Street Theatre
The production runs until 22 January
French dramatist Jean Genet is a rarity on British stages, and I can see why. There are more popular writers that do what he does, only better. Genet’s 1947 The Maids is rarely stark enough to match the claustrophobic brutality of Beckett, nor darkly comic enough to out menace Pinter. Instead it overinflates it’s subtext's big picture until anything else is blotted out.
Two maids secretly re-enact a dumb show of their daily routines with their pompous mistress. One plays the mistress adorned in her fineries, the second scurries around her white walled apartment as the maid. Are they indulging their transgressive instincts to usurp the chains of their subjugation, or does the enactment sap them of their revolutionary impulses? We learn that the mistress’ lover has been arrested, tipped off by one of the maids. The real questions emerge: is their role playing “game” is a metatheatrical swipe at the elusiveness of performance itself, and what does it mean to break free from your prison?
Martin Crimp’s punchy translation crisply indulges Genet’s philosophical musings through meandering but tightly wound exchanges. Anna Popplewell and Charlie Oscar conjure a spritely warmth as the maids mapping the emotional contradictions coiled in their hearts; grateful for the morsels of kindness their mistress ungraciously bestows upon them, but palpable hatred boiling within them. Murder might just be their only way out. But any symbolic heft in the lumbering themes weighs down the narrative momentum. It seems inevitable that it would all cave into a Marxist muddle of class conflict and existential psychodrama.
Annie Kershaw’s understated directorial flare deftly dials up the stakes discovering the guttural tensions in Crimp’s translation, but you can tell she is sailing against Genet’s theatrical wind. There is some fun to be had. The real mistress returns, luxuriously caricatured by Carla Harrison-Hodge, all flared nostrils and supercilious grins, fingers pointed as if conducting the staccato rhythm of her airy vocals, an Ab Fab homage by way of Sartre. Joe Dines’s sound design accents disjointed moments of dramatic intensity. But Genet’s overbearing ideas are too unwieldy for this production to find its true beat.
The Maids plays at Jermyn Street Theatre until 22 January
Photo Credits: Steve Gregson
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