The Maids Review – Dorian Gray’s Kip Williams dazzles once again with feverish imagination | stage

SCreens were essential in Kip Williams’ one-woman adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Sarah Snook played 26 parts. A Sydney play has taken the West End by storm with its innovative, well-timed technique. The screens are equally extravagant in this triple knob that sweeps you into its turmoil with relentless speed.

This remake, written and directed by Williams, is a bold, eye-catching take on Jean Genet’s 1947 drama about two maids (and two sisters) who engage in dangerous games of servant and valet and role-playing. Where some of the original’s subtleties about power and eroticism are lost, the technology used boldly here — live smartphone footage projected onto the back panels of the set — captures the feverish imagination that cranks the play’s engine as the sisters slide in and out of mock rebellion against their mistress, referred to as “Madame.”

Williams gives a modern meaning to the play through technology itself: the influencer image industry and online celebrity culture are critiqued. The metaphor is clear, once presented, and creative. The actors’ faces are digitally enlarged on screens so that they look like Botoxed versions of themselves – or their avatars. They are also viewed through a distorted filter so that they appear less human. The slippage into fantasy, for all three women, takes place in a structured online space of augmented reality and performance.

She talks about our world of fillers and liposuction and Ozambique, but she sticks faithfully to Genet’s story, from the poisoned tea the sisters planned to offer the lady, as a way to find freedom from slavery, to the anonymous letter she wrote to the police incriminating her embezzling boyfriend (here’s an email).

The psychological violence takes place amidst the bubblegum pink bedroom of a billionaire heiress. Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Via Saban) initially look like teenagers at a pajama party playing with their iPhones. Wilson, posing as the scorned Madame, singer and porn star takes to the St Matthew Passion (the music ranges from Swan Lake to slick house music) while Saban, as a groveling latex-gloved maid, becomes human spit on her shoes. The melodrama of the fantasy of dominance and submission is brought to life when Lady Yerin Ha enters the bedroom. She is ridiculous, spoiled, overrated and brutal.

The blaring music and Instagram images of the characters’ hands swinging as they film themselves give the play its hallucinatory, disjointed quality. It feels confusing, but perhaps because of the speed of delivery, the dynamic between the women isn’t fully resolved. It is clear that the sisters are secretly bound but there is little exploration of the incestuous undercurrent.

“Madame is the comic Cruella de Vil in leather pants, childish in her narcissism, pacing one minute, giggling the next. She brings a familiar caricature of an influencer and a daddy’s girl, but undercuts her terrifying tyranny over the maids. So, you see the parody of the sisters’ enslavement through the role-playing they play, but not the enslavement itself Exactly, perhaps because Madame is so childish and prone to tantrums – or perhaps this is what modern-day tyranny looks like.

There are stormy performances, especially from Saban and Wilson, and sheer terror as the expectations become more brutal, and the group seems to disintegrate as its inner worlds crack. Rosanna Vez’s stage, covered with gauzy curtains and mirrors, implicates us as “followers” who peek into this virtual world even as it shatters. It’s exhausting, confusing, and exhilarating. Snook won an Olivier Award for Williams’ latest show. Wilson and Saban deserve the same for their amazing and exciting performances.