The Maids
The Maids
A ritual game where identity and performance become dangerously one
Jean Genet’s The Maids is rooted in the experience of social exclusion that the French dramatist, poet, novelist, and political activist transformed into a radical inquiry into power, identity, and desire. At the centre of the play are the maids Claire and Solange, trapped in a hierarchical relationship with their mistress; in her absence, however, their relationship turns into an obsessive game of role-switching, imitation, and escalating violence.
Within this ritual of repetition, the two maids simultaneously enact resistance to power and their own fascination with it. As the boundary between play and reality gradually dissolves, The Maids emerges not only as a drama of class conflict, but also as a study of longing for another life and another identity – one that might allow an escape from the social role to which they have been confined. In Genet’s theatre, laughter is continually interwoven with pain, love with hatred, and subordination with the desire for domination.
In his staging, internationally acclaimed Serbian director Miloš Lolić conceives the production as a rigorously structured ritual in which relations of power are constantly established and dismantled. At its centre lies an extreme precision of performance, psychologically sharpened to the point where the action hovers on the threshold of the rational. The ritual on stage functions as a recurring rehearsal for a crime, in which every error reveals the possibility of the collapse of the established order, while the threat of murder remains present until the very end. An additional dimension of the production lies in the decision to cast men in all three female roles, thereby bringing questions of representation, identity, and the performativity of social roles into even sharper focus.
Small Stage
We invite you to see
