A haughty mistress taunts the maid who is helping her dress – deriding her looks, her smell, her lowly life. “Get out. Take your gobs of spit with you,” she says, with dark glee.
So begins Jean Genet’s absurdist drama about two role-playing sisters who act out the master-servant relationship like an elaborate game of Dom/sub make-believe pushed to the extreme.
Solange (Anna Popplewell) and her younger sister Claire (Charlie Oscar) switch between the part of mistress and maid in their fantasy of power, domination, servitude and rebellion, until Mistress (Carla Harrison-Hodge) enters, bringing with her a storyline of the sisters’ part in getting a lover arrested for theft.
It is not only fantasy, reality and role-play that become intertwined; Genet’s script, beautifully translated by Martin Crimp, combines the resentments and power battles of the sisters with the hate between servant and mistress, until they become dangerously indistinguishable.
Directed by Annie Kershaw, this subtle and artful production keeps the drama’s hallucinatory quality, but brings a counterintuitive naturalism to the fore. It adds to the unsettling atmosphere, rendering the question of what is real and what is part of the game even more confusing.
Popplewell is ordinary in her indignance, not domineering over her sister and certainly less baroque than Glenda Jackson in the 1975 film. Oscar is quietly magnificent as Claire, strong, vulnerable and chilling by turns, while Harrison-Hodge gives a controlled performance, with an arrogance that parades as graciousness.
Genet’s play was inspired by the story of Christine and Léa Papin, the real-life French sisters who murdered their mistress and were imprisoned for it, even though they were believed to have a mental health disorder. Cat Fuller’s stage design carries the vague look of a padded cell, painted over in psychiatric white.
Where the story of a maid and her mistress might have seemed dated (Crimp’s translation keeps its period French references), the modern-day costumes feed into its topicality (given the rise of “home help” and social inequality). The set’s window implicates the audience too, reflecting them back on themselves.
The play’s gothic elements are kept under check, for the better: there is occasional shadow-play in Catja Hamilton’s lighting design and distant notes of violin or heartbeats in Joe Dines’ sound design, which never veers into melodrama.
“I am the monstrous conscience of servitude,” says one of the sisters as they enact their rage, rising up against domestic tyranny. It sounds less absurdist, more a tragic cri de coeur.
• At Jermyn Street theatre, London until 22 January. Then Reading Rep theatre, 28 January-8 February
• This article was amended on 13 January 2025. The correct name of the elder Papin sister was Christine, not Clemence.
