On a stage littered with flowers, flanked by giant mirrors and a long row of designer dresses, ‘two of the greatest actresses alive in our time…two queens,’ as their director calls them, are declaiming and devouring a master work of the 20th century.
Hidden cameras render these larger than life performances even larger with close-ups projected on a giant screen. In this macabre Big Brother room, the two actresses play characters who are always acting – as themselves, as each other, and as their Mistress – in an attempt to fight reality with fantasy, to free slavery with mastery, and to defeat life with death.
Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert throw themselves headlong into their roles as Jean Genet’s maids. They toss their performances into the air like confetti and their lines tumble around the audience – now erratic, now mildly hilarious, now controlled, now overblown, now wildly confident, now utterly terrified. One minute they impose their stage presence and star-power on the characters, the next they allow themselves to collapse under the weight of the maids’ insanity and clawing entrapment.
Written and first produced in 1947, Jean Genet’s The Maids received a less than warm response on its first run. Inspired by the real-life murder of a woman and her daughter by their two maids – the Papin sisters – in France in 1933, the supremely modernist work shocked audiences with its attack on bourgeois values and the incestuous relationship at its core.
A lot has changed in the past 65 years so nowadays, of course, it’s a different story. The audience on the opening night at the Sydney Theatre Company gave director Benedict Andrews’ production an extremely enthusiastic reception.
Andrews has become famous for productions that lift the lid (often the toilet lid) on social veneers to reveal psychological cesspits beneath. As such, he and Genet have a lot in common, so he is almost an obvious choice to direct The Maids. If anything, Andrews showed unusual restraint in this production, allowing the claustrophobic text to pull close about us.
As the play begins, Claire (Blanchett) and Solange (Huppert) – Genet’s versions of the Papins – are in the midst of a frequently performed ritual. In a macabre version of girls playing dress-ups, Claire is impersonating her mistress, sending forth a torrent of abuse towards Solange who grovels on the floor before her, while pretending to be Claire. It’s a sadomasochistic ritual that teeters seductively on the edge of murder until an alarm rings and the maids return to being mere maids once again.
After such a build-up by Blanchett – who uses her imperious queenliness to full affect – the arrival of the actual Mistress could have been fraught with disappointment. But young up and coming star Elizabeth Debicki can more than hold her own in this illustrious company. As the spoilt, unhinged and emotionally abusive Mistress she shines in the sick light of this play. The brilliantly garish set by designer Alice Babidge clearly belongs to her, as do the maids. Once she is gone, it is no surprise that they remain trapped in a room dripping with her personality, with only one exit.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Sydney Theatre Company presents
The Maids
By Jean Genet
In a new translation by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton
Director: Benedict Andrews
Designer: Alice Babidge
Lighting: Nick Schlieper
Composer: Oren Ambarchi
Sydney Theatre
4 June – 20 July
