**** The Maids

Beware the hands that cosset you

Yerin Ha, Lydia Wilson, and Phia Saban in The Maids. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Jean Genet’s Maids this is not, but as a gloss it’s pretty slick. Over the decades, plenty of writers and directors have had their way with this headline-grabbing material. In real life, the murderous Papin sisters of Le Mans, scandal fodder in 1933, never turned on one another, directing their fury outward instead. But why not embroider a bit? Kip Williams’s contemporized rewrite, imported whole from last season’s Donmar Warehouse production, features three attractive young women plunked squarely into our self-absorbed digital zeitgeist.

Typically the two “supporting” roles are cast slightly older, giving the servants an extra decade to age up into resentful drudges. In this version, all three are young and ostensibly marketable. What’s visibly off-balance in the update is that one young woman among the trio of contemporaries has managed to corner all the prizes – fame, attention, material goods. While the sisters share Madame’s abode and a bit of camaraderie, the class lines dividing them remain clearly drawn.

Madame is the influencer, the maids the influencees, and we get to see their power struggles played out in 3D-plus. Video designer Zakk Hein makes brilliant use of live projections to create a kaleidoscope of vivid, fluid images tweaked with enhancements and distortions. The effect actually one-ups Williams’s ingenuity in having Sarah Snook shoulder dozens of roles in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Here, in tighter focus, we see the warring hordes within which occupy each individual, and by extension all of us.

We first spot Claire (Lydia Wilson) in a prelude set in Madame’s diaphonously veiled boudoir, the lair of a sensualist (set by Rosanna Vize). Claire wafts about, doing a token bit of tidying as she toys with toiletries and tries on scents, inventively self-filming all the while. When Solange (Phia Saban) catches her sister slacking off, there’s penance to be paid – nothing too graphic, just their preferred mode of ritualized humiliation. They snap back into their designated social roles when Madame (Yerin Ha) arrives home in a rage, incensed that her rich boyfriend has been arrested over allegations of financial malfeasance – so very contemporary, and a pretty clever strategy on the rebels’ part.

An egotist with barely an ounce of empathy (just enough to freak, by extension, when her lover is under attack), Madame runs to his side at Soho House, leaving the drones all worked up and choking on a thirst for blood. Just whose is all but forewritten; the struggle for status as top girl still standing, however, has its vertiginous turns.

This is soap opera stuff, set at peak emotional volume and likely to leave you shattered. The notion of “glamour” didn’t start out as a covetable quality. Originally, it conveyed the power of a spell, not necessarily benign. This rewrite, luscious and dishy as it is, demands to be interpreted as cautionary – a horror story lurking in the shadows of our huge and growing socioeconomic divide.

Details: The Maids, to June 14