THE MAIDS
by Jean Genet
translated by Bernard Frechtman
Reviews
Leung’s rigorous production plays upon the full artifice of the theatrical form to highlight the ongoing struggle for freedom—personal, social and sexual—in a stylized but hyper-real form.
Eva Marie Clarke
What a fun and engrossing evening of theatre this company has given us.
Colin MacLean
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This production continually flips between stark beauty and hideousness with occasional flourishes of gleefully unadulterated camp.
Eva Marie Clarke
Swathed in glowing folds of red velvet, throat constricted by a jet choker and with the caressing play of light on muscled arms and androgynous shaven skull, the oppressed turns aggressor towering over fellow victim, enemy, sister and petty tormentor…
Eva Marie Clarke
…It is a horrifyingly beautiful moment in Ian Leung’s production of Jean Genet’s 1949 The Maids, a study of power, transference, identity and masks.
Eva Marie Clarke
Just to make sure we don’t mistake what is to follow as anything but unreal, Ian Leung, the director of this intriguing Studio Theatre production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, has his crew carry on a part of the set.
Colin MacLean
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Genet’s stage directions are projected onto a screen. Which one of the actors checks – to make sure he is leaving the stage correctly.
Colin MacLean
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Leung’s decision to stick with Genet’s preferred casting along with costuming that enhances the performers’ masculinity even as it feminizes is a constant visual indicator that things are not as they seem.
Eva Marie Clarke
…what an entrance Madame makes. After an hourlong buildup, there is a flourish of music, and she rises in a cloud of smoke, tall and angular with head of blond curls, draped in white fur and adding an interesting dimension of homoerotic fervour.
Colin MacLean
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Leung, with his ability to tap all the possibilities of set and light in his blocking, and his unerring eye for image is well on his way as an in-demand director.
Eva Marie Clarke
…Leung ramps up the theatricality and psychosexual tension.
Colin MacLean
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Although a thesis project, this production never sacrifices theatricality for academic demonstrations.
Eva Marie Clarke
Just the way Genet saw it 60 years ago – ambivalent, often confusing, and always disturbing.
Colin MacLean
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All in all, a coup de théâtre.
Eva Marie Clarke
Four suns out of five.
Colin MacLean
/
Reviews
Previews
- no previews available
Director’s Notes
Just what was Jean Genet trying to say in his first produced play The Maids (1947)? Something political? Something about identity? Something about theatre? Nothing at all? All the above and more have been emphatically suggested many times over.
We do know he did not mean it to be a plea on behalf of domestic servants. We also know he expressed a desire that men should play the parts. Whatever else he might have wanted to say (or not say), Genet was far more interested in the fact that theatre is fake than he was in realism. His plays acknowledge the lie of the stage, and that honesty has made them useful vehicles for exposing certain falsehoods in real life.
Identities may be freely chosen personal expressions, or tolerably accepted so we can function in the world, or even forced upon us against our will; they can empower, weaken, liberate or imprison us. Their effects are real, but are they not often arbitrary, even imaginary? An orphan, homosexual and criminal, Genet at first was forced – and later defiantly chose – to survey society from its margins. From that vantage point he became attuned to the degree to which identity is about performance. In The Maids, Madame is preoccupied with being a “Madame”. Solange and Claire are not only trapped in “maidness,” they are blind to a way out of it other than into “Madameness”. …or are they?
Ritual fascinated Genet, and he recognized theatre as such. He also wanted to bring mystery back to a world that was becoming increasingly explained by science. In The Maids we witness an unfinished ceremony that finally comes to an end (or near end) three times in succession. I believe there is something wondrous in the last, mysterious resolution, something that offers a way to cast off the shackles and crutches of fixed identities which prevent our growth. But it wouldn’t be Genet if it wasn’t also something profoundly disturbing or infuriatingly elusive. I have my own ideas about it that I hope come across in this production, but I also hope we’ve left enough free rope – enough ambiguity (something else Genet loved) – for each member of the audience to make their own exegesis, swelling the legion interpretations of this play ever further.
Cast
Team
Director: Ian Leung
Stage Manager: Anna Wood
Set Design: Robert Shannon
Costume Design: Colin Winslow
Lighting Design: April Vizcko
Sound Design: Matthew Skopyk
Production History
The Maids opened the University of Alberta Department of Drama’s 2007-2008 UofA Studio Theatre season, running from September 19-29, 2007 in the Timms Centre for the Performing Arts
Dates:
October 20 – 29, 2007
7:30 pm evenings (no show Sundays)
2:00 pm matinee Thursday, September 27
7:30 pm preview Wednesday, September 19
Venue:
Timms Centre for the Performing Arts (UofA Studio Theatre)
87th Avenue NW & 112th Street NW
Tickets:
$19.00: Regular
$10.00: Senior/Student
$5.00: Preview, September 19