The Maids – Jermyn Street Theatre, London

Writer: Jean Genet, translated by Martin Crimp

Director: Annie Kershaw

A warped powerplay between two sisters gripped with the desire to kill their mistress dominates this revival of Jean Genet’s psychological thriller co-produced by Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep.

The Maids, translated by Martin Crimp, follows maids and sisters Solange (Anna Popplewell) and Claire (Charlie Oscar), whose increasingly frequent ritual of acting out their sordid and violent desires towards their Mistress threatens to boil over.

The play opens with Claire doubling as the Mistress, violently and verbally degrading her sister Solange in a cruel role-play that the sisters repeat whenever their Mistress is out. Their desires to be more than maids, and to have the same authority as their Mistress, play out in these scenes with increasing tension, as the lines between fiction and reality for the pair blur. Solange and Claire are also culpable for landing the Mistress’ husband in prison, and fearing the worst with his impending return, conspire to murder their Mistress and escape their lives of servitude.

It is a production that relies heavily on the strength of the two leads, and in Anna Popplewell and Charlie Oscar, The Maids is in good hands.

Popplewell gives a gripping performance as the menacing Solange. Popplewell brings Solange’s manipulative and violent personality to the fore without relying on overplaying this. The subtle delivery of quick glances, piercing expressions and rigid posture makes Popplewell’s Solange so unpredictable, particularly as the character’s plan for the Mistress’ death starts to unfold. This is coupled with a superb monologue at the play’s close, where Solange indulges in her insanity, which is played powerfully by Popplewell.

Alongside Popplewell, Oscar’s display as Claire is aptly frantic, with the younger sister falling into the murderous plan set out by her older sister. Oscar’s range is impressive in this piece, as it is Claire who doubles in the role play as the Mistress, enabling Oscar to shift personalities seamlessly and push the blurring of fact and fiction for the sisters further. This is particularly striking towards the end of the piece as Claire returns to ‘playing’ the Mistress one final, desperate, time.

Carla Harrison-Hodge’s appearance as the Mistress provides some much-needed comic relief in an otherwise dark production. Harrison-Hodge’s comic timing draws out well the obliviousness of the Mistress to her treatment of the sisters and her behaviour as an upper-class woman, and this is a nice contrast to the rest of the piece.

One particularly eye-catching aspect of this piece is its design. Cat Fuller’s set design mirrors a padded jail cell, perhaps foreshadowing the lives to come for the sisters but also symbolising the entrapment the characters feel as their madness takes hold. This sterile white works to contrast the colour of the violence, and the blood-red dress of the Mistress which becomes so vital in the piece. In addition, Catja Hamilton’s lighting design evokes menacing shadows that draw out the increasingly eerie atmosphere well. The combination of set and lighting makes for some clever uses of a mirror and glass screen though this feels increasingly like an optional extra to the performance, which has much more potential than is utilised, almost too quickly struck from the scenes it is used in.

Martin Crimp’s translation captures the brutality and vulnerability of the sisters at their best and at their worst, though the script does feel a little too obvious in places with some dialogue feeling out of place jarring with the tensions created. Nevertheless, The Maids is a striking production and Annie Kershaw’s direction leaves you gripped as the 90-minute run time flies by.

Runs until 22 January and then at Reading Rep from 28 Jan to 8 Feb 2025