A young woman takes selfies on a pink mobile phone in a glamorous boudoir filled with pink flowers. Her mistress arrives and berates her for failing in her duties as a housemaid. As the quivering maid bustles about in a vain attempt to alleviate the tension and stop the volley of insults, it becomes clear that both women are enacting a game – or ‘ceremony’ – they have played many times. When Madame, their real employer, arrives the sparks fly faster and brighter as they accelerate towards a fatal conflagration.
Jean Genet’s 1947 drama is an intense, claustrophobic power play that was inspired by the notorious real-life case of two sisters in France who murdered their employer in 1933. Updated by Kip Williams (who created the one-person The Picture of Dorian Gray with the help of AI imagery) this toys with the same technology though far less successfully. By turning Madame (Yerin Ha) into a wealthy fashion influencer and name-dropping Martin Margiela and Bottega Veneta it turns Genet’s dark social combat into a frivolous bitch-fest.
At first surrounded by diaphanous curtains, the stage is diffuse; when opened, reality is exposed and the 15-foot mirrored wardrobes at the rear reveal yards of outrageous clothes. The sisters, Solange (Lydia Wilson) and Claire (Phia Saban) distort images on their phones that appear on a screen while Madame keeps up a torrential dialogue of self-pity, arrogance and rampant entitlement that is funny until it becomes tiresome.
While writer/director Williams has flashes of engagement – Madame talks of “a hate crime against my serotonin levels” and the fact that Claire has to use her full body weight to slide open the massive wardrobe doors – he has substituted style for substance, anaesthetizing Genet’s sulphurous danger and replacing it with a barrage of AI effects that deliver little more than a migraine.
THE MAIDS: THE DONMAR WAREHOUSE TO NOVEMBER 29