The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre review - new broom sweeps clean in fierce revival

There are two main reasons to revive classics. The first is that they are really good; the second is that they have something to say about how the world is changing, perhaps more accurately, how our perception of it is changing. Both are true of Annie Kershaw’s slick, sexy, shocking production of Martin Crimp's translation, up close and personal, at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Even if you haven’t seen the play (and, with productions as frequent as they have been, many buying tickets for this sold out run will have) the set-up is familiar. Two maids, resentful of their unpredictable and needy mistress, play out BDSM fantasies, until the game goes too far. It also boasts the catnip strapline that it is inspired by a true life crime – the infamous Papin Sisters murders of 1933.We open on a role play, not immediately obvious, but teased as the insults fly and the BDSM element pushes through the text. Unlike some past productions and somewhat against the playwright, Jean Genet’s intention, both servants and The Mistress are played by women, although there’s a certain deliberate androgyny in the waistcoat and trousers of the owner of the apartment, further manifest in her eye's lingering on the favourite. That all-female casting decision certainly tilts one’s reception of the power dynamics on show, giving a more naturalistic feel to a work that sits in the canon of the Theatre of the Absurd and helpfully avoiding the spectre of the pantomime dame so soon after the season.

Charlie Oscar lends the mentally more robust Claire the chippy combative character of a younger sister, a bit bitchy, a bit brutal, aware of her sexual power. She shifts her vowels once out of her mistress role, a very English signifier of class in a French play and done on a slide rather than Eliza Doolittle’s rollercoaster – had the dice fallen differently at birth, she'd be in charge of the household. We also see the limits of her commitment to the murder plan, wavering as she is egged on by her sister, an important foreshadowing to an ending left satisfactorily ambiguous. Will she always voluntarily stumble when push comes to shove in their plot?

Anna Popplewell (pictured above with Carla Harrison-Hodge) has a tougher job with Solange, older and more damaged by their tiny controlled lives, she is both more serious and more unhinged, never more so than in her long, near-closing monologue of visions – reminding me of Mia Goth’s nine minutes tour-de-force address in Pearl. If Claire is more neurotic than psychotic, then Solange has the scales balanced the other way, Popplewell’s understated performance subtlely pushing home that truth. 

Carla Harrison-Hodge has the hardest job in the role of the underwritten mistress, little more than a cameo even in this crisp 90 minutes version. She’s flighty, impetuous, desperate for attention from her accused (off-stage) lover who has been fitted up by the maids and mindlessly cruel in her empathy-free bubble. She doesn’t quite say “Let them eat cake” but she’s not far off, an avatar for the oligarchs these days who straddle a mountain of money and another of misery. 

But the action is tight and personal, set in a bedroom, the most intimate space in any home. The maids live in-house in a garret in order to be at their mistress’s beck and call, essentially imprisoned by poverty and powerlessness. It looks and feels like modern slavery, something we now know goes on behind the security cameras and locked gates of the mansions little more than a brisk walk away from this theatre. It's a sobering thought.

It’s in those echoes that the maids, separated not just from independence but so divorced from their own identities such that they can only find them in role-play and exaggeration, find their voice in 2025. The subjugation of any person, through violence or deprivation or poverty of opportunity will bring forth a reaction. And it won’t just be two maids in a maisonette dropping barbiturates in a martinet's tea, it’ll be thousands, maybe millions, at the ballot box and on the streets.      

• The Maids at Jermyn Street Theatre until 22 January and Reading Rep from 28 January to 8 February 
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk