We take a look at how critics have been reacting to Kip Williams’s take on Jean Genet’s play…
Broadway World: **** “Williams’ The Maids runs for one hour and forty-five minutes with no interval. It’s so fast-paced it doesn’t flag. However, at times I wish the action slowed down once in a while to let the audience breathe and reflect. But this quibble doesn’t dent what’s a hugely strong play with a moving denouement where no one escapes from a spiral of love and hate in a fantasy social media world.”
WhatsOnStage: *** “If The Maids never fully coheres, it nonetheless reaffirms Williams as one of the most distinctive directors working today.”
The Telegraph: ** “Kip Williams’s screen-fuelled staging of the French playwright’s psychodrama is borderline unwatchable.”
The Stage: ***** “Australian director Kip Williams turns Genet’s psychodrama into a dazzling digital-age headrush.”
The Guardian: **** “There are storming performances, especially from Saban and Wilson, and a hurtling dread as the projections become wilder, the set seeming to disassemble as their inner worlds crack apart.”
Theatre Weekly: **** “In this version of The Maids there are many liberties taken with Genet’s original, but this adaptation feels timely and urgent. It’s a visionary recreation that speaks to contemporary anxieties about the curated self. The result is a darkly comic, unsettling and thoroughly modern piece of theatre.”
The Standard: **** “The phone-based tricksiness will be familiar to anyone who saw Williams’s extraordinary Picture of Dorian Gray with Succession’s Sarah Snook last year. It works beautifully here too but will surely show diminishing returns if it’s his main tool in rebooting classics. This show demands a strong reaction, and I imagine as many will hate it as love it. But if you’re prepared to surrender, it’s a wild ride.”
Time Out: *** “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.”
The Arts Desk: ** “Kip Williams revises Genet, with little gained in the update except eye-popping visuals.”
London Theatre.co.uk: *** “Williams shows that Genet’s drama, revived a few times over the years (most notably by Jamie Lloyd in 2016, with Uzo Aduba, Zawe Ashton and Laura Carmichael), is ripe for a modern interpretation. But his version is still grasping to find something more than its surface-level spectacle.”
Daily Express: “Director and adaptor Kip Williams’ previous update of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray was an undisputed triumph. I gave it a five-star rave. With surgical precision and flamboyant flair it eviscerated both Victorian and our own modern gaze, internally and externally in society, towards beauty, vanity, external validation, self-worth, ageing. Its revolutionary use of big screen projections and mobile phone apps to enhance and then distort grotesquely was pitiless and powerful. This show tries far too many of these tricks again, yet achieves absolutely nothing.”
The Independent: ** “Australian director Kip Williams radically reimagines the 1947 satire – to limited effect”
The Financial Times: *** “But, despite all this, we lose the play’s political punch. It tends to work well when the maids’ portrayal of the mistress contrasts with the more insidious, entitled nature of the real thing. Here we don’t quite get that cold slap of reality. In a sense that’s the point: the seductive superficiality of online life distracts from fundamental inequalities. But even so, the jeopardy that fuels the ending never quite bites and any rage at real-life exploitation feels curiously muted. In the end, perhaps appropriately, the show seems somehow to consume itself.”
To book tickets visit: https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/whats-on/the-maids-fs5q