THE MAIDS
THE MAIDS, Sydney Theatre Company at Sydney Theatre, June 4-July 20, 2013. Photos by Lisa Tomasetti: Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert. Right: Elizabeth Debicki.
On opening night someone asked, "why would you stage this play now?" Aside from the most obvious answer: to give two great actresses a chance to stretch their legs and have a rare old gallop, there's another possibly even better reason: what it tells us about the secret life of France. Around the world the impetus towards marriage equality – aka giving gays equal rights – is all in one direction and with scarcely a murmur of dissent. Except in France – home of the chic, the sophisticated, the worldly, the debonair, the c'est la vie, nurturer of hetero-roues such as Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss Kahn – where demonstrations against the legalisation of same sex marriage have been huge and extremely violent. Qu'est que ce?
Yet go back only as far as 1947 – and Jean Genet wrote The Maids in response to a true crime of 1933 when a provincial lady and her daughter were brutally murdered by the family maids. Was the bourgeoisie more outraged by the killings or that the two domestics were found in bed together? And again, in 1949, after he had been found guilty of his tenth "act of indecency", it was only the intervention of such luminaries as Cocteau and Picasso that stopped an automatic life sentence for these "crimes". In other words – should we be surprised that the French have a bit of a thing about gays? Probably not.
As it is, director Benedict Andrews has conjured up a magical if disturbing place where dreams and nightmares, class, cruelty, hopes and frustrations fatally collide: the luxurious boudoir of the mainly absent Mistress (Elizabeth Debicki). There the two maids play out their fantasies of luxury, domination and murder. Claire (Cate Blanchett) and Solange (Isabelle Huppert) are sisters whose sibling love and human aspirations have been corrupted by a lifetime of servitude and disappointment. Claire primps and preens, commandeering gowns, shoes, furs, face powder and lipstick, as well as Solange's attentions and ministrations to enact sexualised murder rituals. All the while, a kitchen timer ticks away on the bedside table, to warn of the Mistress's return home.
The dress-ups and play acting are as bizarre and credible as child's play; and why not, given the infantilisation of domestic servants that traditionally maintained them without autonomy or any of the other rights of adult human beings. That these two play at breaking out, at revenge and have found an outlet for their bubbling rage also says something about the playwright himself – he saw himself as an outsider, an outlaw and he was fascinated by those he saw as the transgressors in the lower reaches of French society.
In a new English language translation by the director and Andrew Upton, the script remains intact, true to itself and easy on the ear. Their most outre act of creativity is to reverse the accepted casting of the servants and their employer. She is a jumped-up, heedless little shit of a Paris Hilton clone, while they are older and therefore plainly without hope of anything better. It renders the antics of the maids so much angrier and more logical and also makes entirely credible the Mistress's imperiousness. That she is blind to the sisters' contempt and hatred is only too credible.
Newcomer Elizabeth Debicki has the daunting task of appearing late in the play and having to leap on the already whirling carousel of heightened drama and emotion created by the two theatre giants, Blanchett and Huppert. And she does it with elan and power. Cate Blanchett, as the younger but alpha sister is as remarkable as ever. When she steps on a stage she leaves any vanity behind and just takes her courage with her; she's got none of the former and bucketloads of the latter and the results are rarely less than astounding.
In this production this key to her craft is made even more apparent because of the cameras. Set behind the glass walls of the wings, and above and on the stage at a dozen or so points, they record seemingly random but carefully plotted moments of the action. These are seen on a large screen high above the boudoir, slyly augmenting or illuminating a moment; exploding an intimacy into a vast image, and punctuating the flow with close-ups of the great bunches of roses and other blooms that decorate the boudoir in manic profusion.
Constantly buzzing and twitching at Claire's highhandedness, Isabelle Huppert's Solange is a dark, visceral presence that contrasts starkly with the pale and cerebral Blanchett. The two are by turns funny, frightening and as time goes by, pitiful in their impotent resentment. Huppert's chocolatey French accent makes her tricky to understand at times, however, and some stinging retorts are lost in translation. Nevertheless, the two are a joy to watch and when joined by their Mistress and with the quick-fire camera choices added to the mix, the stage seems to crackle with energy and the sparks that fly between them.
Alice Babidge is true to Genet's requirement that the stage be awash in flowers (although not the real ones he demands!), her design is at once elegant and claustrophobic with white leather sofas, a large, pale-draped bed and a colour-graded back wall of gowns and furs that gradually display the inner chaos of the maids' lives. If the idea of their despair and humiliation needs to be underlined, there is also an en suite bathroom and a lavatory in which Claire is dunked by her loving sister. It makes for a gasp or two in the auditorium but that's possibly because of the idea of The Blessed Cate's head down a dunny rather than a true dramatic moment.
All in all, The Maids turns out to have dramatic and social resonance in 2013 that has been missing for at least three or four decades. In this production, with these actors and the added juice of the setting and cameras, it's both a spectacle and an intensely satisfying entertainment. At an hour and 45 minutes straight through, it resonates with the onstage dynamics and finally – and unexpectedly – yields some thoughts about France and the French that are as unflattering as those of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys era. Amazing.
