Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It’s somehow fitting to find The Maids at Jermyn Street Theatre, a tiny underground box of a venue, secreted below a London street famous for suiting and booting the gentry. Jean Genet’s play is all about class, secret desires and trapped, marginalised individuals. Written in 1947 and inspired by the gruesome real-life story of the Papin sisters, it remains elusive and disturbing, with its depiction of a clandestine power game played out by two maids as they take it in turns to dress up as their wealthy mistress and fantasise about killing her.Annie Kershaw’s quiet, understated staging (a co-production with Reading Rep) steers away from ripe symbolism and goes in strong on the young sisters’ tormented psychology. Claire (Charlie Oscar) and Solange (Anna Popplewell) feel very real as they conduct their strange, erotic roleplay with one eye on a digital alarm-clock (lest their mistress return home and find them at it) and bicker over the order of the ritual. This serves to make the ambivalences of the drama (translated by Martin Crimp), and the slippery way it plays with performance, all the more unsettling.As the two abuse one another, Oscar’s sultry Claire pushing the arrogance of the “mistress” and Popplewell’s tougher, more troubled Solange the surliness of the “maid” to extremes, the lines between their roles and their own emotions become blurred. When the real mistress (Carla Harrison-Hodge) returns home, their assurance wavers. Now they have the chance to enact their rehearsed crime, but they find reality harder to control than fiction. Meanwhile, Harrison-Hodge’s cleverly pitched behaviour reveals how crude their own depiction has been: her abuse of them lies not in insults, but in her blithe entitlement, her easy assumption of their inferiority and her total indifference to their actual feelings.Sometimes the slow burn of Kershaw’s staging is such that it doesn’t quite march the intensity of the outbursts. But overall it is supple and intriguing, the apparent naturalism of the performances tugging against the accumulating uncertainties. As the play unfolds, its ritualistic elements begin to prompt nagging questions. Where are we? On a stage? In the afterlife? In an asylum? The stark white walls and claustrophobia of Cat Fuller’s set incline to the last of these interpretations. But the window, from which the girls peer anxiously, offers no outlook except a reflected image of the audience, as if Genet were taunting us about our own society. Nearly 80 years after it was written, his play remains as provocative as ever.★★★☆☆To January 22, jermynstreettheatre.co.uk; January 28-February 8, readingrep.com
