THEATRE REVIEW:
THE MAIDS
27 SEPT/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 4/5
Pictured: Ron Kennell,
Maria Ricossa

TORONTO - Obsessed as it is with sadomasochistic role playing, Jean Genet’s THE MAIDS will never be an easy play for an audience to watch. But in a new production that hit the stage of Buddies in Bad Times last week, director Brendan Healy manages to make it so riveting that one might not even notice how squirm-inducing it can be.


Long considered a masterwork from the bad boy of 20th century French literature, THE MAIDS was inspired by the celebrated 1933 murder of a French woman at the hands of her embittered personal maids, two young sisters who claimed they had killed their abusive employer in self-defense. 
As filtered through Genet’s perspective, however, those maids — Solange and Claire — are transformed into abusers themselves, locked in a sick little game where they take turns playing an abusive mistress and her long-suffering maid.
 And despite the fact that, in the playing, the mistress of their fantasies proves far more vile than the reality presented by their actual mistress, they have nonetheless become so lost in their fantastic world that tragedy has become almost inevitable.


While Genet might have played fast and loose with the facts, in this production, working with a translation by Martin Crimp, Healy adds even more wrinkles to Genet’s troubled characters, with some compelling if unorthodox casting. Even though Genet once famously asked that all the women in his plays be played by adolescent males, Healy’s decision to cast Ron Kennell in the role of Claire, the younger of the two maids, is unorthodox, but not so much because of the actor’s gender as his appearance.
 Kennell may not look the part, but as anyone who saw the hugely talented actor in his performance in the title role of Monsieur D’eon is a Woman will tell you, the otherwise masculine Kennell exhibits an uncanny ability to inhabit female characters, rather than merely playing them. And he can do it, even when he’s arrayed in the sort of butch drag designer Julie Fox has given him for everyday apparel in this production.


As Claire’s older sister Solange, Healy has cast Diane D’Aquila (even though she could probably only hope to be cast as Claire’s mother by a director with less imagination), and it works wonderfully well — particularly as Healy further muddies the waters by giving both maids haircuts that flirt with androgyny, suggesting, in the process, that maybe Solange has a secret or two tucked away as well.
In their fantasy scenes together, with Kennell playing mistress and D’Aquila, her long-suffering maid, the two of them are riveting, even though one slowly realizes that the full extent of their depravity is boundless.

That becomes evident with the appearance of Madame, their much reviled and abused mistress. While again, the ultra feminine Maria Ricossa might not be an obvious choice for a character often played as overbearing and demanding, she’s a potent choice. 
Under Healy’s direction she is spoiled, pampered and careless, but Ricossa’s Madame is also clearly almost of another species than her two maids — a gazelle to their mules, a glorious songbird to their mudhens. As such, she has inspired an envy that has morphed into hatred as the two of them have sunk ever deeper into their games and obsessions.


But make no mistake: Set against Fox’s pretty-in-Pepto-pink set, lit by Kimberly Purtell and strongly acted throughout. THE MAIDS is still not easy viewing, but in its deconstruction of human nature, this production is never anything less than utterly compelling.