By chance, on the one-and-a-half-hour carpool ride to see Jean Genet’s The Maids in Barrie, a fellow theatre-goer and I found ourselves arguing about what a director owes a classic. Must they faithfully honour what the playwright put on the page, or should they be free to overturn it? Little did we know we were already preparing for Talk Is Free Theatre’s intimate production, which suggests a more astute possibility: do both.
Reverence and contempt, after all, are already entwined in this disturbing 1947 play. Housemaids Claire (Billy Lake) and Solange (Aidan de Salaiz) resent their mistress, the unnamed Madame (Shannon Taylor), yet remain enthralled by her authority. Whenever she is away, the sisters retreat into an elaborate role-playing ritual, taking turns as mistress and servant, both to inhabit Madame’s intoxicating power and fantasize about killing her.
Director Jillian Keiley stages a similar push and pull with the play’s author. She makes no secret of her quarrel with Genet: in a prologue delivered by Taylor, she calls attention to the script’s misogyny and grotesque vision of femininity. Yet once the action begins, this 80-minute production adheres closely to Bernard Frechtman’s 1954 translation, the actors performing it with almost devotional commitment. For all her impatience with the play, Keiley chooses to stay rigorously within its terms, pushing its logic to an extreme and letting its contradictions show.
Jake Friesen’s set design lampoons the feminine frippery of Madame’s bedroom, the single space in which the action unfolds. Everything is Barbie-pink: the sheets on the central double bed, the dressing table beneath its mirror, even the feather boa framing a translucent window. To the right, racks of dresses carve the room into narrow corridors. It’s femininity polished to the point of absurdity.
The en travesti casting further exposes gender’s construction. Though the swapped casting belongs to the play’s performance history, here the device takes on a different charge. By foregrounding Genet’s sexism, Keiley makes the male bodies performing women newly conspicuous. Lake and de Salaiz enter in jeans and T-shirts and, in eerie coordination, strip before slipping into tight black dresses. Later, crouched on the bed somewhere between prayer and display, they become ungainly, thrusting their backsides towards us as the form-fitting dresses exaggerate their curves.
But gender is hardly the only thing that refuses to stay fixed. The characters continually slip between versions of the self. Impersonating Madame, Lake is regal and cruel, his hands floating elegantly through the air even as he strikes her servant. As the submissive Claire, however, his body folds inward, chin hovering inches from his chest. Taylor’s Madame and de Salaiz’s Solange are just as mercurial: within a single line of dialogue, Taylor can swing from wet-eyed tenderness to viciousness, while de Salaiz revels in the fantasy’s masochistic pleasures before turning on his sister with peevish precision.
Again and again, the stage erupts into shouting and violence, keeping the struggle for power insistently in view. Striking, then, is the complicit role assigned to us as spectators. On entering the makeshift 17-seat performance space, carved out of a unit in Barrie’s single-storey Bay Commercial Complex, front-row audience members find a prop waiting on each chair — flowers, flashlights, a mirror in my case. A staff member instructs us to keep them within the actors’ reach. We become stagehands, passing these objects at the performers’ request. Each time someone snatched the mirror from my hands, I stiffened in surprise. The gesture jolted me out of the safe distance of spectatorship and into awareness of my own role in sustaining the maids’ theatrical fantasy.
Presiding over this arrangement is Taylor’s Madame. In Genet’s original, the character appears midway through and only briefly. Here, she’s present from the beginning, looming over the space as an imposing, menacing force. During the maids’ private ritual, Taylor stands among the audience, quietly controlling the action like a demiurge-director. She whispers instructions to spectators holding flashlights, telling them when to switch them on, whom to follow and when to stop. We, too, are subject to her control.
If power and unstable identity were already embedded in Genet’s play, this production has found new forms to spotlight them. Keiley’s metatheatrical intervention made me feel entangled in the play’s structures of control, while Lake’s and de Salaiz’s richly drawn performances almost made me forget the male bodies beneath the dresses, leaving gender itself hanging by the thinnest of threads — all while hewing to the original script. Like the maids’ ritual, which replicates the hierarchy it seeks to overturn, the production revolts against Genet only to find itself still operating on his terms. And yet, there’s something exhilarating in watching that rebellion unfold.
The Maids runs at Talk Is Free Theatre until October 3. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Alessandro Stracuzzi
Alessandro Stracuzzi is a Toronto-based theatre critic and performance researcher from Italy. He holds an MA in Performance Studies from the University of Milan, and writes about contemporary theatre, performance, and experimental practices. His criticism has appeared in Stage Door, Our Theatre Voice, Stratagemmi, and Fermata Spettacolo.
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