Everbody has heard of the French writer Jean Genet, but his plays are still unfamiliar to many people, and that includes me. This makes this stunning version of The Maids (Les Bonnes), written in 1947 and directed by Jamie Lloyd at Trafalgar Studios, a rare theatrical treat. I don't know enough about the original texts of the play to judge how far Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton have changed what Genet wrote, but their version, first seen in Sydney and then in New York, packs a terrific punch.
Lloyd, who has single-handedly turned ATG's Trafalgar Studios into a creative destination over the past couple of years with a string of innovative revivals, proves again he has the magic touch. This is a three-hander, with American actress Uzo Aduba playing Solange, Zawe Ashton as Claire and Laura Carmichael as the Mistress. They all make a big impact, but it is Ashton whose charismatic performance should propel her into the front rank of British stage acting. From the first moments of the play, as she pouts and preens like a drag artist in an aggressive fantasy dialogue with Solange, Ashton dominates the play, managing to convince both as herself and as the Mistress she is playing. She's a phenomenon.
The role-playing between the two maids is a build-up to a murder that never happens, with the two sisters fighting each other for dominance and primacy but unable to transfer their fantasy of killing into a reality. Designer Soutra Gilmour has set the play in a rectangular box in which the floor is covered in rose petals, hiding a pattern of triangular cupboards under the floor. It's resolutely non-realist, with no furnishings to distract from the costumes and the few significant props. The play shifts between guilt and innocence, between light and darkness, between wealth and poverty, between white and black, between power and impotence. I found myself thinking of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's career-killing episode with an African chambermaid in a smart New York hotel.
Genet's gift, like that of Tennessee Williams, seems to me to lie in the way he realises characters whose internal fantasy life is far more real and vivid than their outward existence, and who only exist fully when they perform for each other and for a wider public. 'Move away from the window,' Solange says to Claire.
Trafalgar Studios is of course an unsubsidised West End theatre, so the ticket prices here are expensive. But until the theatregoing public wises up to this exceptional production, there are discounted seats to be had in Leicester Square on the day at a very reasonable £25, and the show runs until May. I unreservedly recommend it.
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