Persona... The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre

I contain within me both vengeance and the maid and give them a chance for life, a chance for salvation.

This performance pulls you in confronts you and leaves you staggering into the dark on Jermyn Street questioning not only reality but the meaning of cruelty. Jean Genet’s play maybe almost 80 years old but it has lost none of its power to shock in its display of the fantasies that kill even as they sustain the existence of two sisters locked into a life of servitude with no chance of escape.

Foucault wrote about how society can be measured by its approach to incarceration and this has a wider relevance to the prisons of wage poverty and duty which have trapped many of our forebears and many still. My great grandmother was in service, her mother too and the grandmother who brought her up after – presumably – one of the masters put her in the family way.

This is a great play for women to perform as you can tell from its heritage both on stage – Huppert, Blanchett and Elizabeth Debicki in Sydney – and film - Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange and Susannah York as Claire in 1974. Big shoes to fill but there’s a special energy from Anna Popplewell as Solange, Charlie Oscar as Claire and Carla Harrison-Hodge as Madame on another one of those nights in which the discrete performance space of the JST transformed into a stark Parisian apartment, overlooked at the highest level by a room full of onlookers – the audience cleverly reflected in the glass window.

Charlie Oscar and Anna Popplewell - all photography by Steve Gregson

This is a very wordy play even with the fluidity of Martin Crimp’s translation, yet the cast are remarkably sure-footed throughout as if they’d just spent a year in a verbal boot camp, toughening themselves up for the pace of delivery as well as the expression of the essential brutalities of Genet’s play, trust me, if you see Anna, Charlie or Carla outside after rehearsals or a performance, give them space and don’t try make any jokes!

Inspired by the real events involving the Papin Sisters in 1933, the play examines not just the class struggle but the nature of imprisonment and the combined imaginative power of the sisters. They start the narrative by play acting with Solange as Claire the Maid and Claire as their Mistress, there are various transgressions not least in their wearing of their mistresses make up and clothing but also in the sexual undercurrents of their play. They are so in character its hard for the audience to know what is real and what is not. A perfect start to a play to confounds expectations and challenges our sympathies.

Anna Popplewell is excellent as the older sister, forceful and yet considerate, worrying about her sister even as she tries to order her about. Charlie Oscar has the playful air of a younger sibling but is also protean convincing in play as the mistress and then switching from doubt to resolution as their grand plan takes shapes and big decisions and resolution are required. Both take the roles of their mistress equally well, switching from dominance to submission across the full spectrum of the power relationship.

Anna Popplewell and Carla Harrison-Hodge - all photography by Steve Gregson

When their mistress does appear, as eloquently portrayed by Carla Harrison-Hodge, we see what they’ve been contending with. Their employer is more than that and not for nothing does she refer to them as her “children”, she infantilises them and knows she is in complete control. Her lover has been arrested thanks to a letter sent by Claire who fears exposure but, before hearing of his release on bail, Madame is in a self-indulgent strop offering her expensive clothes as gifts to her temporary friends only to withdraw them without a thought. 

Within this oppression the girls’ only escape is fantasy and thoughts of taking control in the only ways possible. They are the most unreliable of narrators but the beauty of the play is in gradually allowing the audience to solve the clues pointing to reality. It is such a playful yet deeply unsettling experience as they look to gather the courage to kill their Madame and find the freedom they long for. 

IThankYou rating: **** It’s impossible to not be impressed with the performance level as the cast delivers the story in such visceral ways you’re sucked into the concerns of these desperate women whose lives are only ordinary in so many ways. 

Annie Kershaw directs with pace and power as her cast patrol the stage like frustrated animals in an overlooked zoo robbed of the enrichment of their natural conditions. She is a graduate of Jermyn Street Theatre’s Carne Deputy Director Scheme and The Young Vic’s Genesis Future Directors Award – it’s great to see such new dramatic talent coming through!

The Maids runs until 22^nd January and is a coproduction between Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep and the show transfers to Reading from 28 January to 8 February. 

Full details and tickets are available on the respective websites: 

Jermyn Street Theatre 

Reading Rep Theatre

Charlie Oscar - all photography by Steve Gregson