“The Maids” Is a Pile of Fake Flowers

Photograph by Stephanie Berger
Photograph by Stephanie Berger

It’s a measure of Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert’s willingness to stay open and grow as stage performers that they even agreed to appear in the director Benedict Andrews’s version of Jean Genet’s “The Maids.” Andrews, who worked on a new translation of the 1947 play with the writer Andrew Upton, is the kind of director actors are often drawn to—flashy “bad boy” handlers on the prowl for cultural relevance. (Andrews is the director behind the current London revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring the underrated, fascinating Gillian Armstrong.) But Andrews’s edge is borrowed; we’ve already seen his use of video cameras, stylized choreography, soundtracks featuring popular “underground” music, clear glass walls, overstuffed sets, and so on, first in the work of the avant-garde Flemish director Ivo van Hove and then in shows staged by the American director Jay Scheib. These are theatre artists of note, with an interest in how classic material does and does not play in the contemporary world. Unlike van Hove and Scheib, though, Andrews is in thrall to the machinery of culture—stars and sets and the like—and his enthusiasm stops short of where it should really count: the script itself.

“The Maids” was Genet’s first play to be produced. It is an unequivocally literary work, written after the author published his most famous book, “Our Lady of the Flowers,” in 1943. Genet’s long one-act play was inspired by the famous Papin case: in 1933, two sisters, employed as maids, brutally murdered their employer’s wife and adult daughter. Much was made of the scandal by certain leftists, who saw the sisters’ violence as a blow against class oppression. Genet’s thinking was somewhat more nuanced than that of his contemporaries; he used metaphor and narrative to depict a violence that pushed against domestic incarceration.

Genet places the two sisters, Claire (Blanchett) and Solange (Huppert), in an atmosphere dense with symbols of gentility—cut flowers, a lady’s wardrobe, a vanity. But there is no Madame present to tell the sisters how to behave or whom to dress, so they costume one another in clothes, language, and behavior that comes from their interior selves—which have been twisted by lives in service, unfulfilled desire, and the habit of measuring themselves against other women. In their fantasy of retribution and lust, Claire “plays” at being Madame, a creature made up of hideous, shallow needs, paranoia, and pain. Claire accuses Solange of being pregnant—it’s all the gardener’s fault. But then she says that “we” are going to have the imagined child, drawing no separation between Claire and Solange as sisters. This is dangerous play, and it gets further mixed up when Claire admits to having denounced “Monsieur”—presumably their Madame’s real husband or lover—to the police for crimes that Genet never makes explicit.

Genet’s theatrical genius was to dispense with French rationalism onstage and demonstrate how heightened language was itself a kind of theatre. (I would have given anything to see the original show, if only to revel in the artist Christian Bérard’s no doubt on-the-money sets.) Eventually, the sisters hear Monsieur’s voice; he telephones to say he’s been released from prison and will meet Madame (Elizabeth Debicki) at a restaurant to talk things over. But the sisters fail to give their mistress the message straightaway. After Madame returns to her extravagant room—littered, now, with the dreams Solange and Claire must keep silent—she immediately plunges into what she knows: abuse, control, contempt, all of which Blanchett has imitated perfectly and, in her fever, misinterpreted, too. Claire can only “act” powerful; she does not know what it means to feel it.

Tottering off to the kitchen to make Madame a cup of tea, Claire looks like she’s the victim of a migraine: her head throbs with the loss of who she is; the games are dying down. But not yet. Still withholding the information about Monsieur, Claire makes her employer some tea laced with sleeping tablets. Her death would solve a number of problems, including the problem of Madame herself. If she dies, the sisters will be free. But in Genet’s world freedom is provisional. We are all prisoners in a system we embrace even as it grinds us down. Who would the sisters be without their “oppression”? Actors who do not know how to enact freedom.

Andrews is interested in his actors, but only insofar as they imitate other actors in other directors’ work. He mirrors van Hove and Scheib in the way that Claire mirrors Madame. Like those directors, Andrews relies on video to underline the theatricality of this particular score. Stage left, a man dressed in black stands behind a clear wall, a video camera pointed at the very thing we’re looking at on stage (vases of flowers, a shoe, and so on). Video documents the way the sisters’ games begin: with the ritual of dressing. Claire wants to wear a white dress with spangles, but Solange knows she looks better, more imperious, in red. Before long, we the audience know we’re in trouble: we can barely understand what Huppert is saying as she enacts her humiliation, and then her domination, over this “cunt” who, by virtue of her wealth, is supposed to be her superior.

As the ladies flung the “c” word around, I tried to remember whether Genet ever used that sliming word in his dialogue, and that’s when I ran up against another problem: the translation. Edwards and Upton infuse the script with a verbal bluntness and ugliness that has nothing to do with what Genet tried to achieve. (They cut Solange’s last daydream about power, for instance.) Nowhere in his text does Genet use the “c” word. It’s as if Upton and Andrew, vibing on the fact that the play was written by a gay man who had expressed a wish that the parts be played by men, the better to point out the piece’s absurdist point of view, equated Genet’s queerness with hating women. Maybe they thought they were doing Genet a favor by, you know, ripping the lid off his misogyny. But “The Maids” is a fantasy—about pain, about playacting, mixed in with a deep understanding of how power works on the powerless.

In his rich book about Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the play was part of a tradition of “circular sophistry” that began with the Greeks. That is, Genet’s story is first one thing and then quickly becomes another. Claire plays at being the sisters’ employer; Solange pretends to be Claire, and so on. Given all that, reducing Genet’s thinking to “c”-word this and “c”-word that is criminal, and it dishonors the language. In his drama, the playwright described mental and physical torture in the most beautiful language possible, in order to create tension between acting what is said and what is emotionally “true.” (In his other powerful one-act, “Death Watch,” Genet expresses his artistic credo when he has one character say to another, “It’s by its sweetness that you recognize catastrophe.”) Instead, Andrews just has the actors talk and shout to justify his choreography, thereby making the show feel, ultimately, like a pile of fake flowers.

I’m sure that, when Andrews and his team were putting this show together, it seemed like a good idea to cast the French-born Huppert in a French classic. But what does her accent have to do with Blanchett’s Aussie Claire? Are we meant to understand that they’re “playing” with tone and meaning in order to better exploit the idea of Genet’s theatre-as-language?  (If Andrews wanted to take the show further he would have had Huppert speaking in French while Blanchett answered in English, the better to play up the idea of rational and irrational thought coexisting.) Huppert’s English in this play is deplorable, and because she doesn’t have a handle on it she can’t attach her soul to it, or to the part. Her Solange has no weight, because she doesn’t understand the text, and so Blanchett has only a Greer Lankton-like puppet to play against. She over-emotes to fill space; she alone makes an attempt to convey Solange’s pitiable backstory. (Debicki tries, too, but in the end she’s all tears and hair.)

As the women chew scenery, screech, and cry to prove their emotionality in the midst of Andrews’s derivative thinking, a videographer records Blanchett and Huppert’s faces—those noble, tragic, lush faces that have meant so much to us in the cinema. Sometimes they’re shot from underneath the vanity, or in a bathroom. The close-ups further reduce the production—their silent power to captivate and propel us into another dream space has everything to do with the cinema and nothing to do with the stage. As I watched Blanchett give Claire her all without quite understanding who she is, I thought of the Sydney-based star’s continued growth in productions like last season’s outstanding “Uncle Vanya.” Her Yelena was one for the ages. The strength she displayed there, as well as in some of her film roles, had me thinking how marvelous it would be if Blanchett, certainly the heir to Katharine Cornell and Lynn Fontanne, headed a repertory company on this shore, too. There, she could make theatre about the soul with very little interference from directors who try to pass off their various rip-offs as the work of a knowing spirit.