It's taken a while for
Stewart Laing to get Jean Genet's play, The Maids, onstage. Given
that the director, Tony award winning designer and founder of
Untitled Projects has made what might be dubbed the Penguin Modern
Classics canon of French authors something of a specialism over the
past few years, this comes as quite a surprise. At last, Laing's
vision of Genet's power-play between two servants who act out their
fantasy of killing their mistress is brought to the Citizens
Theatre's main stage where Genet's work hasn't been seen since the
1980s. That was when Philip Prowse directed and designed Robert David
Macdonald's translations of three Genet plays, The Balcony, The
Blacks and The Screens.
The Maids itself hasn't
appeared in the Gorbals since Lindsay Kemp directed Tim Curry in the
play back in 1971. Kemp was a long time admirer of Genet, and also
produced Flowers, a seminal dance-theatre interpretation of Genet's
novel, Our Lady of the Flowers. The only recent sighting of The Maids
at all in Scotland was a mini production by Pauline Goldsmith at the
Tron's Changing House space in 2011. So given his extensive back
catalogue, both at the Citz and with French work, what kept Laing so
long in bringing The Maids back to what might just be its spiritual
home?
“I've wanted to do it
for years,” he admits, “but when Giles, David and Philip were
running the Citz, Philip wouldn't let me do it, because he said it
was a play that too many students did. He said it had had too much
exposure.”
Genet drew The Maids
from a real life murder case involving two sisters who bludgeoned
their mistress and her daughter to death before being found in bed
with a blood-soaked hammer. The case scandalised 1930s France, and
captured the headlines even more when intellectuals including Simone
de Beauvoir claimed that the sisters were victims of a bourgeoisie
who treated their servants with contempt.
In some respects this
echoed how Genet himself had been championed by the likes of Cocteau
and Jean-Paul Sartre when he was threatened with a life sentence in
prison following numerous convictions for petty thievery. All of
which cemented Genet's status and reputation as the ultimate literary
outsider.
This was no more
evident than in a famous BBC TV interview recorded in 1985, a year
before Genet's death. The hour-long programme was led by playwright
Nigel Williams, who would go on to adapt Genet's play, Deathwatch,
for the stage. What followed saw an initially monosyllabic Genet turn
the tables on Williams and his crew, questioning the false constructs
of such a set-up in what turned out to be a final, wilfully singular
performance.
“I've been watching
it a lot recently, and I'm tempted to use it in some way,” Laing
muses. “I think there's something about Jean Genet that he sees a
metaphor for the world in any situation. He saw that interview as a
metaphor for the whole of society, and so started to say 'I don't
understand why I have to sit here and you have to sit there, why
don't we swap places?', and that was his entire take on society. The
person in prison is as interesting, if not more interesting, than the
person in government living the ideal of a middle class life.
In keeping with Genet's
provocative instructions for the play, Laing has cast three very
young male actors in all three female roles.
“In the 1940s the
divisions between genders was much more clearly proscribed,” Laing
points out, “ whereas now, I can see it in nineteen and twenty year
olds that gender is a much more fluid thing in terms of how they
behave. So it's a particularly interesting moment to go back and
look at that, and to look at what drag, for want of a better word, is
actually about, and what it means now in a trans-gender world to do
drag. There's a political way of doing the play, which some people
see as a kind of revolutionary emancipation of the maids, but for me
it's more about gender and how reality and fantasy blurs between
these three people onstage. The theatricality of that situation is
really interesting.”
Laing's interest in the
French canon was evident from when he directed live artist and
some-time Michael Clark foil, Leigh Bowery, in Copi's The Homosexual
at Tramway. At Dundee Rep Laing directed Jean Cocteau's Les Parents
Terribles, while with Untitled, An Argument About Sex was Laing and
writer Pamela Carter's response to Marivaux's La Dispute. An earlier
collaboration between Laing and Carter, Slope, looked at the messy
lives of poets Verlaine and Rimbaud, while the soon to be revived The
Salon Project, in which Laing dressed the entire audience in period
costume for an intellectual exchange of their own making, was loosely
derived from Marcel Proust.
“I've done so many
French plays,” Laing muses. “I sat down the other day and made a
list of everything I'd directed, and about half of it is to do with
French culture. It's something that I don't quite understand, because
I don't speak French, and I don't spend a lot of time there, but it's
something that I keep on coming back to, and that confuses me. It's
maybe something to do with me growing up in East Kilbride, and my
first experience of theatre being coming to the Citz with the school.
I think there was something about that which opened my eyes to the
fact that there was a bigger world out there. It expanded your
parameters.”
Genet, and The Maids in
particular, it seems, has always trickled into popular culture. Peter
Zadek, who directed the first UK production in French at the ICA in
London, enlisted sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi as set designer. It was
Lindsay Kemp, of course, who taught mime to the then fledgling pop
singer David Bowie, whose 1972 single, The Jean Genie, drew a
portrait of a Warhollian character he christened with what he
admitted was a clumsy pun on Genet's name. As with The Maids, Bowie
made gender-bending a creative stock in trade.
More recently, while
Katie Mitchell took a naturalistic approach at the Young Vic, Neil
Bartlett directed a production in a Brighton hotel, in which the
performers would toss a coin each day to decide who which part they'd
play. This year will see a major production of The Maids in Sydney,
starring Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert.
“I find that
reassuring,” Laing says. “Genet's plays aren't on the shelves in
Waterstones, so he's getting lost. I think he's become quite
unfashionable, so for me, that's as good a reason as any to be doing
his plays.”
The Maids, Citizens
Theatre, Glasgow, January 17th-February 2nd
The Herald, January 8th 2013
ends
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