Director Annie Kershaw brings life and humanity to Jean Genet’s chamber play about two servant sisters role-playing the murder of their foolish, aloof mistress – and that’s not easy. The Maids is both an angry shout about social inequality and a meandering meditation on illusion and reality. Translator Martin Crimp keeps the language mannered and heightened but Kershaw and her young cast invest the show with conviction.
The play was loosely inspired by a true-life 1933 case and first staged in 1947. Though the script retains period French references, Kershaw and designer Cat Fuller lift it visually out of a specific era. Nineteenth-century furniture sits on a set dressed in squashy, square white panels around a big opaque screen window, like a 1970s episode of Doctor Who.
