Kip Williams’ new version of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar Warehouse propels Genet’s mid-century “hall of mirrors” into the age of the selfie, the influencer, and the digital filter. In this sleek, unsettling, and darkly funny production, Williams replaces Genet’s florid formalism with the quickfire idiom of social media, turning the playwright’s study of illusion into a portrait of how we perform ourselves on screen. Supported by a superb creative team, it feels both faithful and strikingly contemporary.
Genet’s 1947 play centres on two maidservant sisters, Claire and Solange, who, while their employer is away, enact a ritual of fantasy and revenge. They dress as “Madame,” hurl insults, and rehearse her imagined murder in a dreamlike ceremony that exposes their envy, devotion, and rage. What begins as a perverse game of imitation turns into a dangerous act of rebellion, blurring the line between performance and reality.
Williams relocates the action to Madame’s mirrored bedroom in 2025—a world of ring lights, luxury branding, and filtered reflections. The production opens with Solange (Phia Saban) cleaning in her chic uniform, pausing to take selfies, before Lydia Wilson’s Claire joins her. Their mistress, Yerin Ha’s Madame, soon appears in a designer “casual and sexy” outfit, complete with pink wig and dark glasses, as if stepping straight from a livestream into her own bedroom. All three are young, beautiful, and speak in crisp, modern English; distinctions of class and nation dissolve. What remains is psychological: three versions of one self, endlessly performing and policing her own image. Even their colouring suggests a gradation of identity—Solange’s red hair, Claire’s brunette tones, and Madame’s dark locks tracing a spectrum from imitation to power. The sisters’ servility now plays out as obsession with status and visibility; envy of wealth becomes envy of followers. The ritual of murder becomes the fantasy of exposure.
The actors’ interplay is remarkable. Wilson’s Claire flickers between fawning servility and vicious parody, while Saban’s Solange channels the fury of a woman who sees no escape except imitation and revenge. Ha brings to Madame a playful self-indulgence and magnetic charm—a woman who delights in being adored yet is never satisfied. Her constant costume changes mirror an inner restlessness. Together, the three create characters who are painfully human, desperate to escape lives defined by other people’s wealth, beauty, and attention.
Williams sharpens Genet’s theme of performance into a satire of celebrity. Madame’s anxiety that her fans are deserting her because her lover has been arrested mirrors today’s influencer culture, where love, scandal, and betrayal play out before a voyeuristic public. Every gesture is recorded, replayed, reframed: the maids film themselves and each other, seeking authenticity through the very technology that falsifies them. The mirror is no longer a symbol of self-knowledge but a machine of self-manufacture.
The glamour is seductive, the comedy razor-sharp, yet an undertone of dread runs through every scene. Jon Clark’s lighting glows with the brightness of a ring light one moment and the chill of interrogation the next. Rosanna Vize’s mirrored set becomes a glamorous trap, overflowing with pink flowers—roses and peonies, those emblems of beauty, love, and prosperity—here mass-produced and plastic. They dominate the room, at once decorative and suffocating, until the maids, in a burst of frustration and rage, scatter them across the floor. It’s a startling image: rebellion through desecration, beauty turned debris. Under Clark’s lighting and Zakk Hein’s video design, reflections multiply until the space itself feels unstable. Faces are captured, filtered, and stretched into grotesque perfection—the hall of mirrors reinvented as the hall of filters.
Stylish, intelligent, and unnervingly funny, this Maids proves that Genet’s “hall of mirrors” still reflects us perfectly—only now the reflections are digital, and we can’t stop looking.
By Jean Genet
Director & Adaptor: Kip Williams
Cast: Lydia Wilson; Phia Saban; Yerin Ha
Running time: Approximately 1 hour 40 minutes ( no interval).
Until: 29 November 2025
Photography: Marc Brenner