This play will mess with your mind. Gloria Lagou (Decadence) brings another drama out of mid-twentieth-century obscurity, and like Decadence, The Maids is small-scale but high-impact.
Jean Genet’s 1947 play was inspired – if that is the right word – by two brutal murders in Le Mans fourteen years before. It transpired that two maids in a lawyer’s house had surprised the lady of the house and her daughter in the dark, gouged out their eyes and then bludgeoned them to death with a hammer.
In the first scene, Genet presents the audience with a confrontation between Madame and Solange, her eerily deferent maidservant. Madame is tyrannical and yet strangely insecure, and when Solange protests her total devotion to her mistress you feel that she is somehow in charge. A dance ensues. Madame, the oppressive harridan like a caricature out of The Rugged-Trousered Philanthropist, and Solange, the hollow-eyed servant who speaks more powerfully through her silences and her self-deprecation than Madame does through all her bluster. It is pure class struggle. Marx’s wettest wet dream. ‘The fall of your dress, I’m arranging your fall from grace.’ Suddenly, Solange strikes her mistress: ‘Madame thought she was protected by the barrier of flowers?’
Yet all is not as it seems. Just when you think you understand where the play is moving, it changes direction and focus, until you are no longer sure who the characters are or what they are doing. Identity, real life and fantasy blur and chicane in a shadow-world of total possibility. Genet toys with the viewer, tosses you about and leads you away into the mists like a will o’ the wisp. The key word for this play is control: everybody thinks they have it, even you in the audience, but it slips from your fingers just as you grasp it.
Lagou’s production is excellent in every respect. With only three actors, the cast have been able to focus closely on every single word and gesture. Roseanna Frascona’s Madame glimmers with a precarious charisma and is strangely sympathetic at times. Her pangs of conscience are made to seem wholly consistent with her proud and oppressive character. Rachel Dedman as Claire is also convincing, but pride of place goes to Frances Hackett playing Solange. She manages the role with an ethereal ambiguity; you can never quite place her.
‘I can see in your eyes that you hate me, that you loathe me,’ says Madame.
Claire’s eyes light up. ‘I love you, I would follow you anywhere!’
You almost suspect she is telling the truth. Every concept in this play bleeds into its opposite: love into hatred, power into weakness, and Madame’s overbearing perfume struggles to dominate the acrid smell of the maids’ bleach. The Maids will take you unresistingly by the hand and lead you on a merry dance through your own assumptions and expectations. This is a subtle and mature presentation of a play that deserves far more attention than it gets, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anybody who thrives on instability and fantasy.
The Maids is at the Frewin Undercroft (near the Union), Tues-Sat, 19.30
