Arts editor HELEN MUSA previews The Street’s upcoming season of Jean Genet’s celebrated 20th century play The Maids.

The celebrated 20th century play, The Maids, was written by Jean Genet, famously a jailbird, male prostitute and vagabond until fame bought him a French presidential pardon. 

The play reeks of class envy and rebellion as the two maids – sisters Solange and Claire – alternate nightly to play servant or mistress when their chamomile tea-drinking mistress is out on the town.

The sisters’ parts have been performed since 1947 all over the world by tour-de-force artists, including Glenda Jackson, Cate Blanchett and Essie Davis, but they can just as easily be played by men, and often are. 

Now The Street Theatre, under the direction of Caroline Stacey, is staging the play in Martin Crimp’s 1999 translation, much-praised for retaining Genet’s peculiar brand of poetry while giving it a modern feel.

When I pop in on rehearsals, Stacey reminds me that Genet said he was putting himself on stage in The Maids. But was he doing so as Mistress, or Solange, or Claire? Who knows?

In this production Christina Falsone is the older sister, while Sophia Marzano plays Claire.

Natasha Vickery returns to Canberra to play Mistress, something of a breath of fresh air in this play, outrageous in her natural authority and crystallising Genet’s idea of the rich.

Vickery says her Mistress is a sexual being who’s had lots of different lovers and is willing to follow her present, incarcerated one, the offstage Sir, to Devil’s Island if need be. 

So, it is a case of two against one, maids versus mistress?

“Yes and no,” Vickery responds quickly, “they are a unit.”

Stacey and the cast see Genet’s play as an Absurdist piece and as such, there’s a cyclical element – hate-love-hate.

Sounds confusing? Well, yes, since they often use each other’s names in a perplexing way, but then again, the elegant art-deco bedroom full of mirrors in a set designed by Kathleen Kershaw, gives us a hint that the characters are mirrors of each other, with the reflections, the actors say, cutting us up into pieces.”

Do the maids love or hate Mistress? And does Mistress love or despise them? It is frequently asserted that she loves them, but only as one might like a pet. 

They’d certainly like to kill her, but as Claire says: “Murder is something… Just too funny for words.” 

Solange, as the older one, Falsone says, has maternal instincts that have caused her to protect Claire, although when the chips are down she has the killer instinct. 

But it is Claire, Marzano adds, who is the gutsier one, determined to go through with her plans, although she’s clearly becoming more desperate for escape and more dependent on Solange for it.

The Maids may be Absurdist, Falsone says, but the exciting part about it is the complex role-playing, with the hints of darkness and dirt adding a sense of disenfranchisement, where Genet shows his hand – Mistress can’t tell them apart.

The Street is billing the play as a thriller, with a murder-mystery plot that will have the audience on the edges of their seats, but if you want to know whodunnit, you’ll be on shaky ground. 

Even so, Marzano says, Genet has given the actors enough facts about the characters to work on – the garret they share, their humble origins, the contempt in which they are held, and even at one point a surname, Lemercier, more than Mistress ever gets.

The play, inspired by a real-life murder, suggests that they might find a measure of escape through killing, seen in Solange’s ecstatic showstopper speech where she imagines the servants of Paris lining up to honour her as she passes by to her own execution. 

There’s an almost Christian elevation of redemption through suffering as part of claiming one’s identity.

But, the actors tell me, Genet wrote two endings for The Maids, refining the script to make it more ambiguous – that’s the way this production is heading.

The Maids, The Street Theatre, May 23-June 8.