The Maids (Donmar Warehouse, London)
Verdict: When excess is less
Jean Genet’s 1947 power play, inspired by the real-life battering to death of a mother and daughter by their two servants in the Thirties, has always been a tricky show to pull off.
Writer and director Kip Williams, who ingeniously reimagined The Picture Of Dorian Gray with Sarah Snook, once again shakes up a classic for our self-obsessed, smart-phoned, image-conscious age.
It’s a visual assault: frenzied, giddying, wildly extravagant.
Behind the diaphanous drapes enclosing a deluxe boudoir — a hothouse of overblown blooms — a young woman (Lydia Wilson) poses in designer undies. An influencer with 28.4 millions followers, she is ordering her maid (Phia Saban, in a shapeless shift) to get this gown, that wig, her breathless stream of commands punctuated by her disgust at the maid’s ‘pig face’ — and her own worries that, horror of horrors, she herself ‘looks like I’m 30’.
Sparkling-eyed avatars: Madame (Yerin Ha, foreground) and her maid (Lydia Wilson), in front of the giant projections which characterise Kip Williams’s production
Absurdly self-dramatising, she is always peering into a mirror or taking a selfie, one moment parading to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s Sugarplum Fairy, the next languishing to Mozart’s Requiem. And all the while, the meek maid scurries around, her obedience and adoration complicated by unmasked hatred and contempt.
Behind them loom massive blown-up projections of their faces, distorted by smartphone filters, trout-pouting, sparkling-eyed avatars, hideous and hilarious and scary — and more real than their unfiltered selves.
All feels horribly credible until one of them slips up on the other’s name and it suddenly becomes clear that this is a game — of sorts. While their Mistress is away, these sisters take turns to play the abuser and the enslaved…and fantasise about ending it all by poisoning her tea.
When Madame’s away…The maids (Lydia Wilson and Phia Saban) are out of control
The ceremony is cut short by real Madame’s return. What had appeared to be a parody as presented by her maid, is seen as all too real. Indeed, Madame (Yerin Ha) uses the same phrases, strikes the same poses, now abusive, now patronising (‘You’re really lucky to be nobody in this world’), oblivious to anything but her own deluded overblown invincible ego.
It’s all superbly done — and at an astonishing lick. But overdone, and all on one excessive note, drowning plot, tension, emotion. Too much. Too little.
The Maids runs at the Donmar Warehouse until November 29.
Land Of The Living (Dorfman Theatre)
Verdict: When kindness is cruelty
‘Was what I did wrong?’ asks Ruth. A conflicted, devastated, devastating Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, now in her sixties but who, aged 20, was a UN relief worker in post-war Germany tasked with rehoming some of thousands of children ‘displaced’ from all over Eastern Europe by the Nazis. Imperfect children were killed. The perfect Aryan types were placed with Nazi-supporting families in an endeavour to create a master race.
Though somewhat laboriously revealed in David Lan’s intriguing, important new play at the National Theatre, this is essential exposition.
When an adult man – Ruth recognises him immediately as a child she had become particularly attached to – arrives at her London home some 45 years on, he wants answers or, at the very least, an explanation.
Boy wonder: Artie Wilkinson-Hunt (Young Thomas) gives a tremendous performance opposite Juliet Stevenson (Ruth) in The Land Of The Living at the National Theatre
Ruth summons the past in a series of flashbacks, playing herself over the decades. Superbly.
She had identified ten-year-old Thomas as one of the displaced children, adopted as a baby by a childless Nazi couple, and found him a home in the States.
Grown-up Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha, Game Of Thrones’s mysterious Jaqen H’ghar) has become a concert pianist. But he evidently believes he has lost more than he has gained: his family, his culture, his sense of who he truly is – and Ruth. ‘I longed for you. I was some Kraut kid you found not to your taste and flung back,’ he says.
Meanwhile, in one of the most accomplished performances by a child I have ever seen, Artie Wilkinson-Hunt’s young Thomas finds both an arresting stillness and a ferocious energy as ten-year-old Thomas. In mute rage, he hurls metal plates across the stage, kicks out a window, spits and bites. It is only when a sweet soldier asks him about his dog that Ruth discovers he is Polish.
Boy to man: Thomas (Game of Thrones’ Tom Wlaschiha), now a concert pianist, tracks down Ruth (played by Juliet Stevenson) 40 years after their first meeting, looking for answers
Later, when Soviet soldiers arrive to seize the children, he clings to Ruth, calling her his ‘mama’. No wonder this boy tests Ruth’s professional detachment to the hilt.
Nevertheless, she does what was considered to be the ‘humanitarian’ thing and finds him a new home abroad. Could she, should she, have found his real family? Did she do the right thing for Thomas? For herself?
The Land Of The Living runs at the National Theatre’s Dorfman until November 1.
Ragdoll, (Jermyn Street Theatre)
Verdict: Revenge served hot
A vast, immaculate cream leather sofa stretches across the tiny Jermyn Street stage, which is otherwise piled high with cardboard boxes.
Nathaniel Parker’s raddled Bobby, somehow still believing he’s Someone, is moving out of his apartment. But before he goes, he has summoned Holly, a woman he has not spoken to for decades; so he can ask her to do him a favour.
Why has Abigail Cruttenden’s Holly, poised and sleek in her silk shirt, navy trousers and classy jewellery, obeyed his command and driven 200 miles in the sweltering California heat, only to be offered a glass of water and forbidden from sitting on his status-symbol couch? Former lovers? Unfinished business?
The tables have turned: Heiress Holly (Katie Matsell) and lawyer Bobby (Ben Lamb), who failed to keep her out of jail; and their older selves (Abigail Cruttenden and Nathaniel Parker)
All is revealed in Katherine Moar’s sparky, deftly-written 70-minute play which imagines several meetings, some 40 years apart, between media heiress Patty Hearst (renamed Holly) and the hot-shot, fabulously expensive attorney employed by her parents after Holly, a 19-year-old college girl, had been kidnapped by radical left-wing militants, raped and coerced into the armed robbery of a bank.
Bobby’s dismal defence (he was hungover on the day of the closing argument, having dined with Hollywood stars) resulted in her 35-year prison sentence.
‘I never had your full attention,’ says Holly. ‘You could have cried more,’ is Bobby’s shameless excuse.
No thanks to Bobby, she was pardoned after two years. Now the tables are turned. He is on trial for bad behaviour and her good word would help.
Set in two time zones, the play juxtaposes the characters as they were in the Seventies with the people they became. Katie Matsell is wholly convincing as the goofy teen in a prison overall, chewing her fingers and jabbering to cocky Bobby (Ben Lamb), all side-burns and swank.
In the final scene of Josh Seymour’s gripping, nimble production, the younger characters interact with their older selves and the play fizzes with theatricality. A person can choose not to be a victim, but once a louse, always a louse.
Ragdoll runs at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London until November 15.
