It’s not often that a British director snaps on the Marigolds and plunges into The Maids, Jean Genet’s dangerous, dirty 1947 classic. Jamie Lloyd, who has been in a successful residency at the Trafalgar Studios since 2013, has assembled a starry(ish) cast for this ferocious frolic about the crushing anonymity of servitude. Uzo Aduba (of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black) and Zawe Ashton (of Channel 4’s Fresh Meat) are the underlings playing games of dominance and submission in the perfumed boudoir of their temporarily absent Mistress (Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael, providing a portrait of blinkered entitlement in couture and fur).
Lloyd and his actors lay on the play’s tragicomic hissy fits and writhing power play, its pungent excess, but from the outset this production superficialises the work’s deeper depiction of erotic threat and violence in ways it can’t subsequently reverse. And while Lloyd’s staging ignores Genet’s original instruction that the servants be played by young men, his production remains entrenched in high-camp hysterics for rather too long.
The cast take on American accents here, relocating the sadomasochistic chamber psychodrama among the Stateside superrich. To the thud of dance music, a blizzard of fake rose petals settles on an open casket of a set designed (by Soutra Gilmour) to leave you unsure whether you’re getting a glimpse into a jewellery box or an ornate coffin. Two (possibly incestuous) sisters, Claire and Solange, both used to feeling trodden under their employer’s heels, act out their fantasies of killing and becoming their Mistress (aka the “bitch”).
When we first see Ashton’s Claire, the younger of the siblings, she’s busy role-playing Mistress, lording it over Solange in a blonde wig and scarlet McQueen ballgown. Ashton alternately summons the nostril-flaring, hand-flapping haughtiness and petulant disdain of a Blanche DuBois, a Scarlett O’Hara or a flouncing heiress on a daytime soap. Solange, pretending to be Claire, defies and insults her, then almost strangles her. “You take too long to get ready,” she complains. “I never get to kill you.” Their “ceremony”, with its symbols and rituals, is both an obsessive, gleeful escape and a torment. Fantasy and reality end up as smudged and smeared as Claire’s drag-queeny make-up. When the pair find out that their Mistress’s lover, framed by them for some obscure crime, is out on bail, their scary and magisterially daft way out of this is to lace Mistress’s tea with Nembutal.
Genet’s play is based on a real-life murder case from 1933, but it’s a long time before the stench of real desperation and self-loathing, a sense of uniformed maids wasting their lives in the service of people who don’t care for them, sets in. “We’re shit,” says Solange. “And shit can’t love shit.”
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The gratifications of degradation, and the cost of the “awkward, ugly need to please”, emerge more clearly than the grievances and galling restrictions of the characters’ lives, or the sense that something will have to give. The director has allowed an acting style so voraciously artificial and off-the-leash from the start that Ashton and Aduba struggle to find anywhere to go later on. It’s only by reining things in that their performances find a gathering power, with Ashton pale and strung out, the compact Aduba increasingly sullen and insinuating.
When the South African playwright-director Yaël Farber deployed a black Jean in her version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, another play preoccupied with the pathology of servant-master relationships, it gave the work the hair-raising sense of surprise it too often misses. And you’d have thought that adding race to Genet’s class war by casting two black actors as the mutinous maids would cut through the play like bleach, stripping off old preconceptions and revealing it afresh. It still could, but it doesn’t here.
Only Solange’s climactic speech, imagining her walking to her execution cheered on by butlers, valets, cleaning ladies, janitors and doormen everywhere, finds a truly abrasive anger. It makes you think of that James Baldwin quote that “to be a negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time”. The tensions surrounding America’s racial history aren’t allowed to surface, in part because the characters’ predicament is kept in the realm of the unreal, of the funny-sinister, for too long, without becoming as agonising as it might.
The evening isn’t helped by a blunt tin-opener of a translation by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton, cranked out for a 2013 production starring Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert. The script keeps the insults flying thick and fast (“Everything — every single thing — that comes out of that kitchen is covered in cum and slobber”) and jettisons the original’s formal elements of Catholic Mass. For all the talk of icky bodily fluids, this is Genet on the flash, sanitised side. Nothing too septic to make you shudder.
The Maids
Trafalgar Studios, London SW1
★★★