The Maids at Jermyn Street Theatre review: this meditation on inequality and reality is an angry shout of a play

Director Annie Kershaw brings life and humanity to Jean Genet’s chamber play about two servant sisters role-playing the murder of their foolish, aloof mistress – and that’s not easy. The Maids is both an angry shout about social inequality and a meandering meditation on illusion and reality. Translator Martin Crimp keeps the language mannered and heightened but Kershaw and her young cast invest the show with conviction.

The play was loosely inspired by a true-life 1933 case and first staged in 1947. Though the script retains period French references, Kershaw and designer Cat Fuller lift it visually out of a specific era. Nineteenth-century furniture sits on a set dressed in squashy, square white panels around a big opaque screen window, like a 1970s episode of Doctor Who.

Sisters Solange (Anna Popplewell) and Claire (Charlie Oscar) could be gap-year girls attired to serve at a Soho House reception. With her miniskirt, knee boots, mannish white blouse and tweedy waistcoat their Mistress (Carla Harrison-Hodge) could have stepped out of the latest Tatler.

We first see breathy, earthy Claire dressed in her mistress’s finery, bossing solemn, aggrieved Solange around and heaping opprobrium on her work, her clothes, and her rank breath. Crimp’s adaptation is laced with enervating disgust, references to spit, sweat and body parts, and virulent class hatred. Genet may have been a contemporary of Samuel Beckett, but The Maids feels tonally closer to August Strindberg’s plays from a half-century earlier.

We understand that the maids regularly swap roles in a scenario that ends in strangulation, but what began as a playful escape from the demeaning drudgery of their lives has become a rehearsal for an actual killing. And who can blame them? Their Mistress, once she appears, switches quickly and unnervingly between imperiousness and mawkish sentiment. She’s also too dim to pronounce “chamomile” properly.

But noir quickly turns to farce: the Mistress’s lover, who the sisters contrived to have arrested for theft, has been freed. So they trail after their boss as she prepares exultantly to greet him, proffering an ever-cooling beverage spiked with barbiturates.

It’s impossible to make stuff like this naturalistic. Or lines like “the beauty of my crime was supposed to relieve the brutality of my suffering”. Solange’s final monologue, in which she romantacises herself as a true-crime heroine, is horribly overwrought. Yet Popplewell and Oscar convince as sisters alternately hectoring, cajoling and comforting one another. And Harrison-Hodge makes the ditzy Mistress more than a caricature.

I enjoyed this more than starrier productions I’ve seen, but it still didn’t make me love The Maids. Kudos though to Jermyn Street and its producing partner Reading Rep for giving a rising director free rein, and giving us a chance to evaluate a significant, difficult work by a significant, difficult writer.

Jermyn Street Theatre, to Jan 22; jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. The show will be transferring to Reading Rep from Jan 28 to Feb 8.