The Frogface production of Genet's Les Bonnes (in translation, with odd words like thé grotesquely anglo-frenchified) is impressive. But one wants to add: "... for student drama", which is regrettably damning. There is really nothing to damn: dramatising the cerebral Genet to a watchable standard is an incredible achievement by Gloria Lagou and her three more-than-capable actors (Franki Hackett, Rachel Dedman, Roseanna Frascona). But the audience around me was fidgeting. 90 minutes is, alas, too long for most people to engage with the intellectual shape-shifting of a twentieth-century surrealist domestic tragedy.
It made me think that Les Bonnes must be good to read, and ultra labour-intensive to incarnate. The iridescent "sexte" (as Irigaray might call Genet's sadomasochistic/gynocentric ecrit) describes co-dependency between a madam and her maids, and the latter's murderous fantasies. I suspect that (for it to really transfix people) you paradoxically have to be far more pretentious than Lagou has been, whose modest yet meticulous staging/directing style delivers, as it did with Decadence last year, a solid and sensible interpretation - when the absurdity of the piece demands (perhaps) a more extravagant mise-en-scene - something more like the 1974 film starring Glenda Jackson.
But subterranean Frewin Undercroft's The Maids must get a golden accolade. In a student 'thesp' scene often dominated by flashy bullshit, this play is lovingly done, done with integrity. And the three women on-stage are utter pros. Solange, Claire and Madame all put out a glittering gamut of nuance and authenticity. The fact that the pitch was wearyingly high throughout is a quality of the script, which tortures but refuses to entertain. The lighting, costume and music elements are wonderful. The hunger, devotion and hatred of master-slave relations comes across vividly. As these women act out the ritual of their respective class's desires to each other, they expose the fetishistic nature of desire itself, symbolised by the individual's rapt consumption of her own mirror image.
Consequently, "the hellish agony of our names" is a phrase that stood out for me. Madame is the dress the sister can wear to die in, kneeling before the looking-glass drinking poisoned tea at the hands of her displaced self, Solange. As with Jacobean domestic tragedy, names contain part of the key to a the characters' fate. Claire ("light") and Sol-Ange ("earth-angel" or "sun-angel") evoke Lucifer, the radiant fallen angel. Like him, the maids are both saintly and criminal-holy in their isolation from the world. Like Eve, they come into being staring at their own reflections, tasting forbidden fruits, and splitting the world in two. If 'sol' can mean sun and earth at the same time, how stable is the difference between a lady and a maid-servant? Does one half of the soul of the oppressed have to die, to be free? The Maids issues a refreshing dose of visceral rage underground, and in this respect it is pleasingly situated right next to the Union. Attend, let the carefully weighed words intrigue you, feel poetical, and get political.
It made me think that Les Bonnes must be good to read, and ultra labour-intensive to incarnate. The iridescent "sexte" (as Irigaray might call Genet's sadomasochistic/gynocentric ecrit) describes co-dependency between a madam and her maids, and the latter's murderous fantasies. I suspect that (for it to really transfix people) you paradoxically have to be far more pretentious than Lagou has been, whose modest yet meticulous staging/directing style delivers, as it did with Decadence last year, a solid and sensible interpretation - when the absurdity of the piece demands (perhaps) a more extravagant mise-en-scene - something more like the 1974 film starring Glenda Jackson.
But subterranean Frewin Undercroft's The Maids must get a golden accolade. In a student 'thesp' scene often dominated by flashy bullshit, this play is lovingly done, done with integrity. And the three women on-stage are utter pros. Solange, Claire and Madame all put out a glittering gamut of nuance and authenticity. The fact that the pitch was wearyingly high throughout is a quality of the script, which tortures but refuses to entertain. The lighting, costume and music elements are wonderful. The hunger, devotion and hatred of master-slave relations comes across vividly. As these women act out the ritual of their respective class's desires to each other, they expose the fetishistic nature of desire itself, symbolised by the individual's rapt consumption of her own mirror image.
Consequently, "the hellish agony of our names" is a phrase that stood out for me. Madame is the dress the sister can wear to die in, kneeling before the looking-glass drinking poisoned tea at the hands of her displaced self, Solange. As with Jacobean domestic tragedy, names contain part of the key to a the characters' fate. Claire ("light") and Sol-Ange ("earth-angel" or "sun-angel") evoke Lucifer, the radiant fallen angel. Like him, the maids are both saintly and criminal-holy in their isolation from the world. Like Eve, they come into being staring at their own reflections, tasting forbidden fruits, and splitting the world in two. If 'sol' can mean sun and earth at the same time, how stable is the difference between a lady and a maid-servant? Does one half of the soul of the oppressed have to die, to be free? The Maids issues a refreshing dose of visceral rage underground, and in this respect it is pleasingly situated right next to the Union. Attend, let the carefully weighed words intrigue you, feel poetical, and get political.