The Maids: Jean Genet’s radical spirit is alive and well in this searing adaptation

Something of Jean Genet’s original, subversive spirit has been resurrected in this highly charged revival of his 1947 classic The Maids, a co-production between Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep. The oft-reproduced classic tells the story of two sisters who work as housemaids, and who – when their Mistress heads out at night – regularly take turns role-playing her murder, abusing and debasing each other as a means of expressing their true feelings towards their employer. One night, they decide that it’s the right moment to carry out their murder for real – only things turn complicated when a phone call reveals that the Mistress’s criminal lover, whom the maids had secretly betrayed to the police, has been released on bail.

The spareness of the cast and setting, as well as the creative freedom that comes with translating a play, has led previous productions to do gender swaps, make major stylistic changes to the script or introduce radical design gestures to suit creative whims.

But director Annie Kershaw plays things relatively straight here, with the intimacy of the 70-seat Jermyn Street Theatre drawing the three performances into an intense focus. Cat Fuller’s set of white, padded walls evokes both the intimacy of the boudoir, and the suffocation of an asylum, while a window at the centre of the stage becomes a portal through which the maids’ anxious fever dreams play out. Joe Dines’s sound design meddles with our perception of events, adding a cinematic gravitas to scenes as they reach their climax or anticlimax.

There’s a coarseness to Martin Crimp’s translation – maids are described as a “gob of spit”, a “great lump”, or “stinking of sweat” – which gives events a carnal intensity. Lines in the sometimes-polemical script verge on becoming a frenzied political treatise on class oppression at certain moments, and the cast work accordingly hard to retain the accessibility and realism of the play’s dialogue. Charlie Oscar, who plays younger sister Claire, has the shape-shifting charisma of a stellar comic actress in her ability to switch between husky, sultry charm, and a sense of being repressed to the point of insanity.

Anna Popplewell – most known for her role as Susan in the Narnia franchise – plays her Solange as stern and austere, which can jar with the more frenzied Claire – that is, before Solange is able to eclipse even her sister in a final climactic monologue that becomes a revolutionary call-to-arms. Carla Harrison-Hodge makes for a wonderfully fruity Mistress, expertly blending a cruel snobbishness with dimwitted authority. “Oh what misfortunes the humbleness of your station spare you,” she says so sickly sweetly.

This is a play that feeds off a feeling of instability, tonally switching between comedy and tragedy, absurdism and melodrama. The Mistress is both a dependent and an overseer; the boudoir is both an arena of servile formality and bodily freedom; the maids both despise their mistress and appear to hold an erotic affection for her. Staging a story with such complicated, illusory feelings would be a daunting prospect for any company, but there’s a tightness to the cast here, and their chemistry ultimately sees the action spin into a masterly tour de force.

Until Jan 22