THE MAIDS

About the show

A game within the game: that is how The Maids begins. For years, sisters Claire and Solange have been housemaids of their ‘madame’ in a large house in the city. In her bedroom, they take turns pretending to be madame. Madame has gone to prison to visit her lover who has been convicted based on false anonymous letters, which were written by the maids. And now the two sisters want to kill their mistress. They have devised a good plan, but will they be able to execute it? Jean Genet is the ideal resistance writer. In all of his works, he resists the law, the values of the bourgeois society he hates. His heroes are the outcasts. He provides an excellent description of himself when he writes: ‘I have permanently put myself forward as the spokesman of the human scum that rots away in jails, under the bridges, in the fetid dregs of the cities.’ Genet literally puts them in the spotlight. While a maid usually doesn’t make an entrance on stage more than once and is only given a couple of words to say at the most, Genet reverses the roles. The maid becomes the leading part. In her feminism-inspired work, Katie Mitchell consistently focuses on female experience and perception. In her staging of the story, Claire and Solange are Polish immigrants. That is how Mitchell makes the existing power relations within the play more current. She also casts a new light on sexual identity: madame has become a male transvestite. Man and woman, ruler and oppressor: they are all roles. Mitchell doesn’t just show how they are reproduced and confirmed, but equally how they can be undermined.