The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre Review
Anna Popplewell in The Maids. Photo by Steve Gregson
Written by Jasmine for Theatre and Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review
Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep’s revival of The Maids retains the same subversive power to shock it’s audience that the 1947 play made its name for. This play is a long power game between two maids and their mistress, played out repeatedly, with increasingly high stakes. At any moment you cannot know whether to trust what anyone is saying, the maids switch between their alternate realities and reality with the same unpredictability that their mistress, portrayed brilliantly by Carla Harrison-Hodge, exhibits towards them.
Cat Fuller’s set creates the suffocating confines of a padded cell out of the room where the entire play takes place, bringing to oppressive life the inescapable environment the maids are in. This is backed by the cold lighting is only ever interrupted by the sound and light of flames which sometimes encroach and threaten to come in and destroy this false sense of stability. A centrepiece of the set is the bending and reflecting window, which shows us doubles of the maids which they sometimes talk to rather than each other.
Annie Kershaw’s direction also creates a series of small shocks by using that same window to show us some of Solange and Claire’s internal imaginings, with imaginary figures, fires, or murders suddenly appearing at the window at their most vulnerable moments. This leaves you with the sense that a threat forever lurks just outside the window, that no place is safe for the maids.
The Maids hugely impactful imagery and language is beautifully translated by Martin Crimp, to get across the intensity of the maids’ imaginary worlds. Anna Popplewell’s Solange is a tightly wound coil that you forever believe might snap, whereas Charlie Oscar’s Claire brings a surprising vulnerability which shows itself suddenly, as her confidence builds and shatters time and time again. Most powerfully, her character is given the sense that she might have been able to be a very different person, a little different to their mistress, were the circumstances different. This is fundamentally a show about power and the entire cast does brilliantly at adding emotional depth to the grappling nature of every conversation as the violence that inequality inspires becomes more and more apparent.
This production will have you in for a gripping 90 minutes of theatre which constantly sits at a tipping point between continued entrapment and violence. It is a perfect example of a show which takes place over a few short hours but over that time reveals an entire history of these characters’ world. Whilst that world may seem less familiar today, the social structures less defined, it is still a story that resonates with the power imbalances we find everywhere today. It is well worth a watch if you’re keen to get acquainted with this overlooked and groundbreaking classic that reminds us that the inhuman behaviour of the powerful, in using that power, breeds only violence in the people they lord over.
At Jermyn Street Theatre until 22 January before running at Reading Rep Theatre 28 January - 8 February 2025.
★ ★ ★ ★
