The 1947 play, The Maids (Les Bonnes), sprang from the subversive mind of French novelist, poet playwright Jean Genet (1910 – 1986), one of the most colourful writers of the 20th century. The play – a work “rich in symbolism, philosophy, pleasure and pain” and featuring “dark humour mixed up with a poetic sensibility,” according to The Street Theatre’s CEO and Artistic Director, Caroline Stacey OAM – has been staged and re-staged in theatres around the world countless times following its world premiere at the Théâtre de l’Athénée Paris.
The Street Theatre will soon mount a new production of The Maids, featuring a team of Canberra-based talents with Stacey herself directing.
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Supporting Canberra and its diaspora
“Like all state [and] territory companies we have a critical role in employing and nurturing our artists – on stage and off – at all stages of their careers,” Stacey tells ArtsHub.
“The Maids features three out-of-the-box roles for women and was programmed to profile three of our exceptional early to mid-career actors – Christina Falsone, Sophie Marzano, and Natasha Vickery – in a classic work with extraordinary roles that demand everything of them.”
Read: How a long-term approach to artistic development has benefitted Canberra’s artists
Working behind the scenes in The Maids are “award-winning Canberra-based sound designer Kimmo Vennonen, who has been creating exceptional work for over 30 years in Canberra, nationally and internationally. Early career set and costume designer Kathleen Kershaw continues to build her professional portfolio and our technical manager, Neil Simpson, in his first theatre lighting design role. So you can see we’re connecting artists, some of whom are based here and some part of Canberra’s diaspora and wanting to work in the place that grew them artistically,” Stacey adds.
Entering Genet’s “wildly theatrical” world
The Maids tells the story of two sisters, Solange (Christina Falsone) and Claire (Sophia Marzano), the housemaids of a glamorous mistress (Natasha Vickery). The pair pass the time with obsessive role-playing that reveals their twisted resentments.
“As a company we’ve found the work full of life and totally energising. It is wildly theatrical in nature full of twists and turns, suspense, eroticism, violence, rebellion, and the audience will feel all of the excitement of those forces together with the pain of living in this world and the systems and relationships and ideology that imprisons us collectively” Stacey explains.
American-born translator Bernard Frechtman originally brought The Maids to English-speaking audiences, leading to its Grove Press publication in England in 1954. The Street’s production uses a more recent translation by award-winning UK playwright and translator, Martin Crimp, created for the Young Vic Theatre in 1999. Crimp’s contemporary interpretation sharply conveys the scandals and anarchic nature of the original text.
Stacey explains, “I read a number of translations but fell for Martin Crimp’s lean, economical, and dynamic language and the sharpness and clarity he bought to the original work. He holds those bigger existentialist philosophical questions of meaning in life coming out of post-war France adroitly.”
Genet wrote The Maids during a productive period that began when he was 32. The writer, who was born in Paris in 1910, grew up in a series of orphanages and his early childhood involved various incidents of petty theft. Following a stint in the French Army, Genet’s criminal offences grew. He spent years as a vagabond and was in and out of prisons across Europe. While incarcerated again, Genet wrote his first-ever novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (eventually published in 1943) and also began writing poetry.
After being released, Genet introduced himself and his work to the acclaimed and influential French poet, playwright, novelist, film director and critic, Jean Cocteau. Impressed, Cocteau took Genet under his wing and helped to have the novel published. However, with ten convictions to his name in France, Genet’s 11th conviction threatened to send him back to jail, this time for life. A petition, organised by Cocteau and signed by himself and other prominent arts figures, succeeded in convincing the French President to pardon Genet, leading to his freedom and his subsequent repertoire of novels, poems and plays.
Staging The Maids
The Maids has impacted Stacey both personally and artistically. She says: “I studied the play at university, however returning to it now I am astonished even more by the potency of [its] illumination of the deep desire for freedom in all of us. Of the courage it takes to come into being, to free yourself from dependency on others, to be yourself.
“From the beginning we are drawn into the universe Genet has created. It’s a blazing whirligig fusing the poetic, political, and psychological and utterly mesmerising.”
When asked by ArtsHub what she’s enjoyed about bringing this production of The Maids to life, Stacey responds: “Working on a European classic that [engages with] the difficult questions of human existence in surprising and truly provocative ways. Working with three skillful, intelligent, intuitive and insightful actors discovering this work together and what lies in it. With the actors and creative team, finding the performative language of the work, the trickiness of the work in terms of what is revealed and when (or never), and how the work needs to be shared with our audiences now.
“And there is quite a bit of props business in the work so we’ve enjoyed working with that dimension [too], as we often do work that is very stripped back,” Stacey concludes.
The Maids will run from 23 May to 8 June, at The Street Theatre, Canberra. Learn more about the production.
