Aussie director Kip Williams made a splash over here last year with his ultra techy, video-centric take on The Picture of Dorian Gray, which used a multitude of crafty camera tricks to create a universe of characters out of one Sarah Snook. Next year, he’ll be doing something similar with a Dracula in which Cynthia Erivo tackles 23 different roles.
Those shows originated in Australia and were part of a specific trilogy of one-woman, camera-based Victorian horror adaptations (there’s a Jekyll & Hyde too).
This Donmar adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 classic The Maids is his first original UK production. And the question begged is: are all Kip Williams’s shows ‘like that’, in a visual sense?
The answer would seem to be ‘basically, yes’. While there are no camera operators (there’s no room), Williams’s take on The Maids makes copious use of live streaming from iPhones, not to mention an absolute ton of filters. Here, maids and sisters Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) use them to construct a lurid fantasy world in which they viciously roleplay their similarly filter-addicted Madame (Yerin Ha), who would appear to be some sort of nepo-baby influencer who in turn roleplays a version of her own life for her 24 million online followers.
Visually it’s loud, garish and kind of basic. Which is a good thing! Even when Jamie Lloyd does it, live video in theatre tends to have an arthouse vibe. But actually live video is one of the more dominant means of communication on the planet. The fact Williams uses it in a trashy, teenagery way is fun, reflective of our times, and offers a great way into modernising Genet’s play. Claire and Solange aren’t just locked into a creepy ritual in which they abuse each other in the persona of Madame. They are adopting her persona digitally and visually, trying on her clothes but also her filters, parodying her, worshiping her and embodying her in videos broadcast at gargantuan scale onto the back of Rosanna Vize’s nifty boudoir set.
As well as looking incredible, Williams’s root-and-branch update of Genet’s text is very funny. The maids tear eye-wateringly vicious strips off each other: as the play opens, the always wonderful Wilson is in magnificent comic form, kicking straight off with a venomous rant in which she accuses her sister of having ‘hand herpes’.
For a good half an hour there's something hypnotic about the blur of wild visuals and undigested, darkly comic loathing that pours out of the women’s mouths. It’s exhilarating, hilarious, horrifying stuff. But it doesn’t really have anywhere to go.
The appearance of Madame should herald a change in dynamics and tone. But impressively monstrous as Ha’s capricious influencer is, her arrival doesn’t switch things up tonally in a play that is effectively one long scene. She is largely as the maids portray her. Which makes sense psychologically: their behaviour is learned. But for all its alluring digital dazzle, it leaves Williams’s production rather one note and exhausting.
It’s thrilling there’s a director like this out there. And I love that Williams is so fluent in his medium that The Maids never feels preachy about the pitfalls of social media, just wide open to its possibilities and pitfalls. But as with Dorian Gray, there’s a sense that other directors might have found more emotional heft in the material. A tonal gearshift in the middle would have done so much for it. But I still think you should see it. The cast is great, especially Wilson. And did I mention it looks incredible? If he has room to improve then he deserves our indulgence, because nobody is doing it visually like Kip Williams.
