“You’re building me a funeral parlour with these flowers – I’m suffocating.” Madame cries as she returns home to find her Kitsch room bedecked with gladioli. And indeed the spectators of Chris Adams and Anna Koch’s powerful adaptation of The Maids find themselves equally enmeshed in a web of string-taught flowers and gilded mirrors, gaudily coloured bedspreads and luxurious dresses.
These very items are symbols of what Jean Genet, controversial French playwright and author, considered the oppressiveness of opulence, which Madame, played by the phonetically masterful Alice Porter, is the embodiment of as well as Solange and Claire’s obsession. The two sisters are played by Zoe Bullock and Hannah Gliksten respectively, and are perfect as monsters of self-loathing, slippery identity, and pervasive paranoia, straining under the pressure of a self-imposed mission of murder, and a mistress saccharine and melodramatic – a constant caricature of herself, who doesn’t even know, as Genet himself put it, “the extent to which Madame is playing Madame”.
The play – its insular, effectively maddening one-track plot of maids seeking freedom and revenge through the assassination of their insufferable mistress excepted – presents a complexity which the three actresses and the Koch/Adams duo have clearly perceived. Solange is far more than a bullish, bullying murderess; she is also the life-deprived older sister, desperate to protect and free the younger Claire, profoundly resentful of what her social status has made them both endure.
Claire is more than the domineering, jeering executor of most of their risky plan (the audience is made to understand she has forged letters of accusation to place Monsieur, Madame’s lover, in prison). She is also the self-doubting brunt-bearer of much of Solange’s hysterical blame-laying, and the inhumanly brave precipitator of the play’s startling (if you’re discovering it for the first time) denouement. Similarly, Porter’s carefully put-together rendition of Madame fortunately sidesteps the trap of extravagance and consequent implausibility inherent to the character, and presents us with a very subtly nuanced performance.
The play’s unfolding demonstrates a highly creative use of set and props. The former is quite small and square, with a three-sided audience front, allowing a proximity which only adds to the riveting intensity of the action. The impressive web of string woven above and around the spectators contains what the sisters see as the objects denouncing their guilt – a disconnected telephone, a buzzing radio, a poison-laden tea-table, the despotic alarm-clock, and the dozens of bouquets. On the threshold between a twisted fantasy bordering on the incestuous, and a sordid tale of personality confusion and self-revulsion, The Maids is a great piece of student drama, complete with stellar cast, inspired direction and production, and intelligent design.
A word of warning: for those who will struggle beneath the play’s leaden atmosphere and high decibel level, know that the actresses are working with something that is infamously characteristic of Genet, and that, if anything, they transcend it with the force and stamina of their performances.
FIVE STARS
