For 100 interminable minutes that felt far, far longer, three actors on stage screamed at each other, at full speed, non-stop, barely taking a breath. My poor guest said she felt like she had been assaulted. I felt like I had been on an overcrowded night bus with a maniac gripping my lapels and ranting into my face. Is this what hell is like? Nefarious foreign governments could really take some tips for future shady extraction of information.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the two who are ostensibly playing maids made such a pig’s ear of changing duvets, cleaning up and heinously cleaning (aka smearing) a mirror, that I wanted to jump out of my seat brandishing my microfiber clothes (never travel without ’em), scream, “Please, just stop this insanity!” and get to work. Frankly, that would have been far more enjoyable. And I suspect a lot of the audience would have joined me just to get out of watching the play.
And let me be clear. All three actresses on stage do a Titanic job with the ridiculously impossible, machine gun torrent of text and the ever-shifting moods and tones. But this production is their own personal iceberg – and we’re all going down with it. Director and adaptor Kip Williams’ previous update of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray was an undisputed triumph. I gave it a five-star rave. With surgical precision and flamboyant flair it eviscerated both Victorian and our own modern gaze, internally and externally in society, towards beauty, vanity, external validation, self-worth, ageing. Its use of big screen projections and mobile phone apps to enhance and then distort grotesquely was pitiless and powerful. This show tries too many of these tricks again, yet achieves absolutely nothing.
We walk into the auditorium to thumping club music. Behind white gauzy curtains, in a glitzy (some might say naff) boudoir of giant mirrors and mountains of pink themed floral arrangements, a maid in pink rubber gloves is pouting furiously into her mobile phone.
What appears to be her mistress, a billionaire’s daughter and influencer with 28 million followers, enters and instantly starts berating and insulting her. It is relentlessly degrading, yet there is also a sense that the maid is somehow getting a perverse, almost sexual, kick out of it before she starts mouthing back. Both are clearly and hammily playing exaggerated roles ,which becomes clunkily clear after a very trying half hour, when the real monstrous mistress returns and the curtain dramatically pulls back. Like, yeah, I got the metaphor. Sigh.
Both original women are maids and sisters, and alternate each night playing mistress and servant in something they call ‘The Ceremony’ as a way to process the trauma of their working life. The accuracy of their portrayal of their boss is initially amusing, but then becomes, yet again, almost unwatchable as she endlessly repeats pretty much all the appalling behaviour and insults they had already acted out. At great length.
Sisters Claire and Solange (Phia Saban and Lydia Wilson) are toxically dependent on each other, while also resenting each other. They are similarly obsessed by their boss (Yerin Ha), fetishizing her (even sniffing her hair), while also resenting her and desperate to escape.
I felt their pain. I even began desperately staring at that ludicrously smeared mirror, trying to hypnotize myself into some sort of astral projection out of the theatre. Unfortunately, rather like this production, it didn’t work.
As it all unpleasantly escalates, we’re basically watching three clearly unhealthy people unravel. The mistress melodramatically declares, “I am at risk of becoming mentally unwell.” It’s played for laughs but lands poorly.
The rest is a relentlessly toxic three-way between three extremely damaged narcissists that spirals increasingly ludicrously to a completely overblown and again unbearably over long denouement.
Yes, there are interesting themes about our addiction to social media, our addiction to unreality, our increasing detachment from the real world and ultimately from a real sense of self. All of this has been done so much more insightfully and intelligently elsewhere, including in Williams’ own aforementioned Dorian Gray.
Usually we are all very happy to see that a show has no interval, anticipating something that will clip along swiftly. However, within the first 10 minutes I was desperate to leave and the fact that I knew that I couldn’t discreetly sneak out at half-time, and that the auditorium was also so well lit that nobody could do a subtle runner, just made it all even more excruciating.
Avoid at all costs.
THE MAIDS AT THE DONMAR WAREHOUSE TO NOVEMBER 29