Power games
That the maids Claire and Solange in Jean Genet’s The Maids have lost their grip on rationality is clear from the outset. Their roleplay, heightened language and dramatic speech give them away from the start.
Their poverty and unending service have driven them to the point of plotting to kill their madame, a murder that promises – irrationally – to secure their freedom. While we wonder whether their roleplaying, in which they confuse their own identities (Claire calls her sister Solange ‘Claire’ numerous times) will ever be translated into real action, they have already gone so far as to conspire to have their madame’s husband imprisoned.
They achieved this by writing letters to the police exposing his crime, although the nature of the crime is not identified. This indicates they are capable of executing their murderous plans. However, the fact that their roleplay in which they act out the murder has them indulging in behaviour which borders on the insane, creates a strong suspicion that actual murder would, through guilt and recrimination, push them into real madness. They would exchange being madame’s servants for madness’s slaves.
The madame is hardly any better off.
Leisure has spoilt her, cast her adrift from reality, her life of decadence imparting its own psychosis. Locked into her social role, she is herself a servant to pleasure. Which is why I think The Maids is not about the power of the powerless but the powerlessness and resultant psychosis of those locked in the game of power. Neither the master controls the servant nor the servant controls the master. Rather, they are both controlled by a set of rules which determine their position in life and how they ought to behave, which strips them both of power although they cling to the illusion of power the game provides. The effort to pretend the illusion is real has the potential to drive both master or servant mad. African presidents are particularly at risk.
While the play is confined to the domestic setting of Madame’s bedroom, it has broad social and political resonance which remains relevant some 80 years since it was written.
Commenting on Facebook, artistic director of the National Arts Festival Ismail Mahomed wrote that the two servants in Genet’s play “could easily be two disgruntled Muslims trying to kill off a cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo for his condescending cartoons about them”.
Mahomed praises director Philip Rademeyer for not contriving these political associations and also contends that Genet’s play was about the power of the powerless. There is a strong element of this, of course, those perceived to be powerless can strike at the soft underbelly of the powerful but it’s really a game with set rules. ISIS strikes France, France retaliates by declaring war and bombing Raqqa and the EU contracts its refugee policy. This leads to further ostracisation of Muslims by the West which fertilises the ground for extremists which leads to more terrorist attacks. And so we go round until one or other political entity is exterminated and the other implodes. If Genet was any sort of soothsayer, it will be the West that is murdered and ISIS will destroy itself by imposing such strict Sharia law that its own adherents will be found guilty of some or other heresy, sowing the seeds for a Islamic revolution akin to the protestant rebellion against the excesses of the Catholic church.
The very few individuals who stopped playing by the rules of the game have shown that true power is obtained when power is rejected. Ghandi and Mandela come to mind.
Had Mandela played by the rules he would have taken revenge on Afrikaaners but the act of forgiveness which broke the rules of vengeance allowed a nation to avoid civil war.
So Genet provides food for thought.
I couldn’t stand the play though.
This is partly because Genet’s play is painful to endure. The work is set at high dramatic pitch. After all, what is placed before us is psychotic behaviour. The actors are meant to act out, to be caricatures. Above that, they are all unlikeable characters. Only Claire, played in Rademeyer’s version by David Viviers, elicits an inkling of sympathy as she is the only one who, in the rare moments of lowered tone, becomes human. All the rest is caricature and Wessel Pretorius as the maid Solange, and Melissa Haiden as Madame do well to not let the mask slip although Pretorius seemed ill-cast in a production that takes up Jean-Paul Sartre’s suggestion that young men play the maids. He comes across more a rugby player than maid.
Far worse than the inherent unpleasantness of the play itself though, was the choice of maids’ costume, which was black briefs for both men, with the addition of a black corset for Vivier and an apron and black stockings for Pretorius. It was pure Cape Town camp. A cheap thrill we’re subjected to for 75 minutes or more.
There were a few other things that were equally irritating but thankfully did not last as long. One was the lack of tea in the teacup, the other was the appalling miming of tying Claire’s corset – which she complains is being pulled to tight – while she is wearing a corset. The laces are there in front of us, why not tie them? Not doing so is fakery piled upon fakery piled upon fakery, like a wedding cake with so many tiers it cannot be cut and eaten for fear of it collapsing. Performing the task might allow a touch to reality that could at least ground our perceptions in a play that already has us afloat in artifice.
Ditto the tea.
Despite these irritations which are exaggerated within a play that by its very nature grates at the nerves, Rademeyer succeeds in bringing Genet’s original vision to life. Fed up with Cape Town camp (and Cape Town in general actually) and my youthful flirtation with French absurdists having soured now that passing years have replaced pretension with pragmatism, I found that vision vexatious. Which, absurdly, probably makes this version a success.
— Steve Kretzmann
The Maids is on at the Alexander Upstairs theatre until Saturday 28 November. Book here.