London
The Maids
By Jean Genet
Translated by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton

Trafalgar Studios, to May 21
14 Whitehall
London
SW1A 2DY

7.30pm; mats Thurs, Sat 2.30pm

Runs: 1hr 50mins without interval

TICKETS: 0844 871 7632
www.atgtickets.com/trafalgarstudios

Review by Carole Woddis of performance seen Feb 29, 2016:

Iconic playwright, production strikes the right note
With The Maids, Jean Genet set his seal as one of the most iconic playwrights of the 20th century. With its hallucinatory text and gender-swopping transformations, The Maids also became a forerunner of the extraordinary phenomenon of `drag’, so influential culturally over the past half century.

Initially to be played by men as an exploration of among other things, power relationships, sado-masochism and fantasy, Jamie Lloyd’s production at Trafalgar Studios doffs its hat to two current zeitgeists – gender equality and racial divides. Hard on the heels of the Oscars `racist’ debate, Lloyd’s production features two women in the leading roles of the maids, Solange and Claire – African-American Uzo Aduba and British born Zawe Ashton with `Downtown’s Laura Carmichael as a rich, white mistress, both adored and detested by them.

In fact, American playwright Wendy Kesselman re-sited the two maids in My Sister in this House (1981), an all female version which explored the same real event that inspired Genet’s play but from a more socially realistic point of view.

Lloyd’s production with its translation by Australians Benedict Andrews (of the Young Vic’s Three Sisters and A Streetcar Named Desire fame) and Andrew Upton (the NT’s The White Guard and Philistines) returns to stylisation – Soutra Gilmour’s picture framed box, bedecked in flower petals within which Aduba and Ashton go the rounds watched by we, the audience, on both sides.

Ever aware in theatre, as in life, of performance and mask-wearing, Gilmour’s design captures its author’s aesthetic in a production defined by its studied camp, in which Claire’s initial assumption of her mistress’s role is played out by Ashton as a female drag queen.

Ashton is the real deal. And magnificent. She can play outrageous, extravagant and softer tones. Uzo Aduba as the older sister, Solange, complements her with explosive power and comic force. To watch her gearing herself up under a prepared whiplash of insults is to watch ritual and humiliation coalesce into a volcanic eruption of violence – the resentment of years of servitude breaking out transformed by ritualised performance and love.

At its worst, over-written, The Maids is still an extraordinary expression of pain and suffering, desperation and hate transmuted into beauty. Lloyd does it proud, if noisily!

The Maids
By Jean Genet
Translated by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton

Cast:
Solange: Uzo Aduba
Claire: Zawe Ashton
Mistress: Laura Carmichael

Director: Jamie Lloyd
Designer: Soutra Gilmour
Lighting Designer: Jon Clark
Composition and Sound Design: Ben and Max Ringham
Movement: Polly Bennett
Fight Director: Kate Waters
Associate Director: Jessica Edwards
Dialect Coach: Penny Dyer
Hair and Wigs Designer: Richard Mawbey
Associate Dialect Coach: Hugh O’Shea

Literal Translation: Julie Rose

World premiere of this translation was produced by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Sydney Theatre, June 4, 2013, directed by Benedict Andrews, with Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth Debicki

First perf at Trafalgar Studios, London, Feb 20, 2016

2016-03-02 11:28:30