First produced in 1947, Jean Genet’s play opens with a maid helping her mistress prepare for a night out. Maid Claire tries to organise her mistress, insisting she wear a particular red dress; her employer treats her with officious disdain, rudely commenting on the stink of her sweat. There is something unreal about this scene, lines delivered a little mechanically, not fresh-thought, the language not quite believable. Would even this Madame issue orders like, “don’t laugh at my grandiloquence”? Nobody talks like that.
But soon, that makes absolute sense, for this is not Claire and her mistress but Claire’s sister and fellow maid Solange pretending to be Claire who herself is pretending to be their mistress in a role-play they indulge in whenever their mistress is out, alternating roles on succeeding days.
It is a sinister scenario they are acting out, a rehearsal for the revenge they are planning that involves drugging madame’s tea and rubber gloves. Genet took his inspiration from the notorious case of the Papin sisters who, in Le Mans in 1933, murdered their mistress and her daughter.
Anne Popplewell as Solange is bitter and tense—there’s a time bomb here waiting to go off. Charlie Oscar’s Claire looks good in madame’s red dress, clearly enjoys role-playing their mistress and likes abusing her sister, though plotting together, there is a tension between them. In comparison, Carla Harrison-Hodge’s miniskirted mistress seems much less stylish, but she holds the upper hand though her mind is on her imprisoned lover, not on her servants.
The sisters’ decision to go ahead with their murderous plan is faced with a setback when a phone call informs them that the mistress’s criminal lover has just been let out of gaol, but Solange delivers a wild monologue that turns a claim to be a super-criminal into a revolutionary war cry.
Annie Kershaw, who was Jermyn Street’s Carne Deputy for 2023–2024, gives her production a directness that seems to emphasise its surreality, presenting it without explanation. Cat Fuller’s all-white setting is also strangely unsettling: are its boudoir walls given an expensive leather-panel lining, or is this a padded cell? Its dressing table is raised on a rostrum that makes it a stage within a stage and a large window that, when the blind has not been pulled down to shut out prying eyes, reflects action (and audience) but occasionally seems also to give glimpses of parallel action in the world beyond it. Beside it is a door that is invisible until opened, and that is somehow connected to allow entrances on the other side of the room without passing the window.
With the actors intimately close and real, this is a staging that very simply creates an ambiguity that matches Genet’s challenging, multilevel confrontations.
After its run at Jermyn Street, this production will play at Reading Rep 28 January to 8 February.