★★★★☆
It’s fair to say that Jean Genet, the petty thief turned literary sensation, wasn’t a conventional kind of guy. The Maids, based on the real-life murder of a woman by her two servants, who were sisters, in 1933 in rural France, premiered in Paris in April 1947. By all accounts, it was a wild evening in which Genet was physically attacked by a critic who had called it a “sordid melodrama”.
Genet loved a scene and my how he would have loved what Jamie Lloyd has done with his play: catwalk style, tip-top talent, a master/slave story. By casting two black actresses — Uzo Aduba, best known for Orange is the New Black, and Zawe Ashton of Fresh Meat — Lloyd has instantly updated the play to be about not only class but race. The mistress is played with insane panache by Laura Carmichael of Downton Abbey. I think it is fair to say that Lady Edith would faint.
This psychodrama in which sisters Solange and Claire repeatedly act out the murder of the mistress they love and hate is, by a mile, the most stylish thing on stage in London. Lloyd has moved the action to the present-day American south and the set, strewn with petals, à la American Beauty, is made up of a giant four-poster coffin bed in the middle of the room. All props emerge from under the parquet tiling. This set, by Soutra Gilmour, is a wonder and will win awards.
All three actresses are sensationally good. Aduba as Solange is a dense ball of fury, and the inaugural scene, where Ashton as Claire wafts around, impersonating her mistress with an ethereal brutality, is the stuff of dreams. The two create a strange-fruit world all of their own. Carmichael smashes the make-believe as she sashays in wearing a shine-on-crazy-diamond ensemble of mini-skirted suit and shoes.
The only weak link is that this translation by the Australian theatre directors Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton is indulgent. The latter is also the husband of Cate Blanchett, who played Claire in the 2013 production in Sydney. The script sprays the c-word round with tom-cat abandonment. After a while, you want to shout: “Hey, guys, we get it, the maids are degraded! Stop spraying!” It’s also too long, at one hour and 45 minutes without a break.
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What stays with you, though, are not the words but the acting and the fatal beauty of the set. It is simply intoxicating.
Box office: 0844 871 7615, until May 21