“I can’t stand the way I see myself in you. My hands, your hands. My black socks, your black socks, my hair, your hair… Loving each other in disgust isn’t loving each other at all”.
The two maids in Jean Genet’s play, sisters Claire and Solange, whisper words of love and hate to each other, and therefore project onto themselves. They are one of many elements in the play that suggest everything contains its opposite. The interchangeability of their identities extends to their apologetic Mistress, who carelessly gets them mixed up (although it must be added we have done this in the rehearsal room too…).
There are many powerful dualities in Genet’s writing that usually serve in the modern world as organising principles (love/hate, man/woman, subject/object, bad/good, reality/illusion) and yet there is nothing organised or principled about the way he uses them. For example, when the sisters perform their special role-play together, they inhabit the roles of Mistress/Maid and yet dizzyingly slip between their fantasy roles and their ‘true identities’. When the third character arrives, the ‘real’ Mistress, our perception changes again. Thus the characters’ relationships, the action of the play and the interplay of reality/illusion burst the form of a ‘binary’ and thus subvert existing ways of thinking. This manifests as a constant sense of imperfection on stage. No identity is fixed, or performed in totality, an idea further heightened by our production, in which the three characters are cast with male actors.
In all of Genet’s dualities, no one can exist without the other. Thus, the characters of Claire and Solange form a pair that cannot be reduced to the sum of their two individual parts — they move beyond a clear boundary. Genet allows us to gleefully make a comparison here to the relationship of audience/performer. The event that takes place when audiences watch a piece of theatre is something that cannot happen without both parties being present. A performer doesn’t exist without an audience. A maid does not exist without her Mistress.
This type of thinking is helpful to understanding Genet’s relationship with himself. When he wrote The Maids in 1947, he was a complete outcast who had nothing. An orphan, ward of the state, homosexual and criminal from the age of 10, Genet was rejected by society and abandoned by his mother. Genet was thus imprisoned not only literally for his crimes by the court of law but also by his status as an outsider, oppressed by societal ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that denied him options or control over his life in real terms. His method of escape was fantasy. He subverted normal moral ideas by performing criminal acts as if they were sacred and enshrining his difference further: “My life as beggar familiarised me with the stateliness of abjection… I wanted to affirm it in its exact sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur”.
Just as Genet wrote himself out of his status as criminal into Saint by dissolving the boundary between them, the maids imagine themselves both as the beautiful, glamorous Mistress, and as her glorious, epic murderer. Lily Sykes began this rehearsal period brilliantly by leading us into Genet’s mind and back out again, and reminding us that his play is not a black and white moral tale about the dangers of class divide. There are no clear heroes or villains, and the Mistress is actually rather nice and relatable. Genet had no interest in using his work as a message of warning against suburban bourgeois values, because his existence depended on them to feel free:
“If I cannot have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched…in order to achieve something new with such rare matter”
As someone concerned with aesthetics, rather than morality, he thought art was about beauty and sensation, rather than political change. While I think we do have moral responsibilities as artists, Genet has reminded me of the strong tendency we have to ascribe moral ‘necessity’ to art in today’s current political chaos, which leads us to lose sight of what art is really good at: opening up a door beyond usual ways of thinking. We hope the production will ask more questions than it will provide answers.
Maybe you could say Genet was an immoral person, that you wouldn’t want to be his friend (but definitely would want to have him for dinner) — frankly, I don’t think it matters! We are taking a brilliant text and using it to explore the possibilities of human liberation. One of the many things we can take from him is: ‘fantasy is powerful!’, and who better to translate such a piece than Martin Crimp, who can add to that: ‘language is powerful!’. Indeed, his dialogue fully equips our fantastic cast of 3 with linguistic weaponry in the play’s triangular game of power.
This play depends on an audience for it to exist, so I urge you: come and see it.
The Maids runs at HOME 16 November – 1 December 2018. Find out more and book tickets here.
Hannah Calascione is assistant director on The Maids and Trainee Director at HOME as part of her MFA in Theatre Directing at Birkbeck, University of London. @hcalas1
Quotations taken from The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet, (Grove Press: NY, 1964)