FringeReview UK 2025
The Maids
Jermyn Street Theatre in Association with Reading Rep
Genre: Drama, European Theatre, LGBT Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre, Translation
Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Ferocity caresses this revival of Jean Genet’s breakthrough play. His second, The Maids from 1947, receives its first production in London for several years, in a co-production with Reading Rep at Jermyn Street Theatre. Using the 1999 translation by Martin Crimp, it’s directed by its recent Carne Deputy Director Annie Kershaw till January 22nd. After this it transfers to Reading Rep from January 28th to February 8th.
Genet’s black-mass inversion of sacrament streams rage on Mistress’s faux-martyrdom, returning to frame endgame. An exceptional revival.
Genet’s black-mass inversion of sacrament streams rage on Mistress’s faux-martyrdom, returning to frame endgame. An exceptional revival.
Review
Ferocity caresses this revival of Jean Genet’s breakthrough play. His second, The Maids from 1947, receives its first production in London for several years. Recent ones have taken a hint from Genet and recast men in the roles. Here, as with Jamie Lloyd in 2016, the three roles originally cast for women revert to the all-female original, in a co-production with Reading Rep at Jermyn Street Theatre. Using the 1999 translation by Martin Crimp, it’s directed by its recent Carne Deputy Director Annie Kershaw till January 22nd. After this it transfers to Reading Rep from January 28th to February 8th.
Though subtly updated in Cat Fuller’s dress and set, this production shows the power of a classic reading and all three actors are outstanding in this drama of intimacy, role-playing and genteel class-oppression with slap-downs. Jermyn Street’s intimate space proves ideal too. An oppressive white wall-to-wall construction like a bijou prison envelops everything including white props and dressing table: save a portal that’s both mirror to actors and audience. In Catja Hamilton’s noirish lighting, it slants into a street outside. The only disrupters are a blood-red dress and fox-fur, not the black and white worn by maids and mistress.
Crimp’s version too is sleek, sinewy, poetic. In its few quotes from Macbeth and elsewhere, it’s brightly observant of the rhythms of Genet’s own classicism: Racine swapped out for Shakespeare.
Genet would have liked that. Emerging from prison he excelled in perpetrating establishment classic prose and verse spoken by murderers, pimps and here by cruelly exploited sibling maids obsessed by crime stories. Such ritual’s stretched years. The sisters now disrupt it. Claire’s shopped Mistress’s criminal lover who’s been charged with theft. Now he phones to announce he’s got bail. Their part in his arrest will be discovered. Time to kill Mistress.
Inspired by a real murder case, Genet refuses to follow it: he invests his maids with a world punctured by their employer. Role-swapping maid and mistress, they perpetually enact strangling her. It always stops short. Till now.
Solange (Anna Popplewell) and younger Claire (Charlie Oscar) role-play in turn so at the start Oscar’s cut-glass and white gown proclaim a deceptive status till her toying and cruel digs at Popplewell’s Solange force out-of-role comments. Which only ratchets up. When Oscar breaks she reverts to mild Estuary, like Popplewell, but can snap back to surprising authority. Diction throughout is cut-through clear with all three actors. Popplewell shifts from subservient through commanding, reverting to maid role and finally a monologue seething with longing.
A sisterhood hint at frottage extends fascination with Mistress’s rising breasts as she sleeps, alongside the siblings’ declared loathing. Kershaw invokes it like the Carol Ann Duffy poem ‘Warming Her Pearls’. “The sheets warm with her precious life” mines a near-identical sensibility.
Though the sisters mimic an intimacy betraying feelings, the real attempt comes when halfway through Mistress (Carla Harrison-Hodge exuding privilege and casual solicitude to “children”) arrives. Her headlamp entrance amplifies off-hand patronizing, casual cruelty. Harrison-Hodge’s comic timing glints with the speed of another world. The feathery shudder of sex-and-death as Popplewell skims her hands over her, is broken by Harrison-Hodge’s “stop touching me!”
The entitled noting trivia as displacement for worthwhile living, rings out. Mistress is happy Claire wears her make–up, not removed in time. But Mistress notices a writing-desk key is displaced. The sisters withhold good news, till they can’t.
Having donated dress and furs to the sisters – who’ve been strutting in them – Mistress snatches them back, learning of her lover’s release. Which heralds champagne, not drugged chamomile. The maids are left to piece a shattering way out.
It’s like Racine, whom Genet inverts here. Kershaw doesn’t miss this: the play ratchets up like seventeenth-century tragedy amongst Palladian finery: its fury is however vented on just such privilege. Joe Dines’ sound is liminal. Max Richter’s Vivaldi’s Four Seasons teases the ear. Street-noise morphs so you wonder if someone’s left a commentary on their mobile. Harsher sounds intrude though: the only thing to pierce this pressure-cooker world is a buzzer or telephone.
“Everything… that comes out of that kitchen is covered in spit and saliva.” Some translations and production go far further: Benedict Andrew and Andrew Upton made language more explicit in their 2013 version used by Jamie Lloyd in 2016. At the end of his life Genet sexed up his first play, Deathwatch, making it far more explicit. The strength of this production is returning its power to through classical restraint in production as translation.
Kershaw, as well as coming through Jermyn Street’s Carne programme, is also a recipient of a Genesis Future Directors Award at the Young Vic. On this evidence, and her work in the 2021 all-day Odyssey here, she’s a director to watch.
Popplewell’s Solange blisters a final soliloquy, blazing putative ends and oppression’s means till the crisis, pure Racine monologue inflected with Macbeth’s tomorrows, paeans deliverance from bondage. It’s overwhelming but Claire caps it in a final role-play. Genet’s black-mass inversion of sacrament streams rage on Mistress’s faux-martyrdom, returning to frame endgame. An exceptional revival.
