Guest Blog: 'It’s Beautiful and Ugly': Director Annie Kershaw on Power and Control in New Adaptation of THE MAIDS

In 2024 I was Carne Deputy Director at Jermyn Street Theatre. The role was designed to teach the recipient about the day to day running of a theatre with the view to one day leading a building. During my time at JST I was lucky enough to support an array of brilliant productions including Roy Williams’ adaptation of The Lonely Londoners, which has transferred to the Kiln early this year. I had an amazing time at JST and am so grateful to have been mentored by Artistic Director Stella Powell-Jones during my time there.

Previously I had cut my teeth with Reading Rep, the local theatre where I grew up; a place that grew to feel like a home. I started doing car park duty at age 16 and slowly worked my way up, mentored by their Artistic Director Paul Stacey, to be an intern, Assistant Director and finally a Director in 2022 of Hedda Gabler, starring Anna Popplewell.

These two buildings have been extremely formative in the development of my career, and have led to where I am today: I was very excited to introduce the two theatres last year, both of which programme exciting new work. The Maids is a new collaboration between Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep, which I have the joy of directing - I’m so pleased to also be working with Anna Popplewell again, who is taking on the role of Solange.

The Maids is about two maids who plot to kill their mistress. I am true crime obsessed, so part of the appeal of the play for me was the potential to explore what drives people to commit murder. I was also interested in its links to the Papin sisters, real maids working in 1933 Paris who brutally murdered their mistress and her daughter; a scandalous story that was the talk of the town at the time. Additionally, Martin Crimp’s adaptation employs such theatricality and beautiful language, and whilst remaining faithful to Jean Genet’s original text.

For me, this play is about how power works in all senses of its meaning. Two maids playact how they might kill their mistress - but also plot to turn their games into action. These maids feel so trapped and miserable in their current existence that their fantasy world and reality intersect in a desperate attempt to reclaim power and better their lives. The mistress, meanwhile, goes from drunk with power to feeling powerless back and forth like a yo-yo. This cycle and constant shifting of power dynamics led us to interrogate whether anyone can fully feel power in reality, even with high societal status and wealth.

Early on, I felt drawn to the ‘play within a play’ element of the text. It starts with the maids deep into one of their re-enactments of how they might kill their mistress, dressing in her expensive gowns and pretending to be her. The maids feel powerful in their game and powerless when they are broken back into their reality. I was interested in how we could reflect this when constructing the rules of our play only to later disrupt them.

I hope an audience’s experience of this leads them to recognise the power of escapism, and how a hard crash into reality might drive drastic action. That crashing between escapism and reality is something we can all understand to some extent - for some, it may be leaving a whole new universe behind by logging off a video game, or for others, the humbling hangover that you wake to after a wild night out.

Experiencing those extremes with the maids is vital to understanding why they so desperately need to change their situation; even if this empathy doesn’t quite extend to justifying their act of murder, we can identify with the feelings driving them. A lot of our work has gone into conjuring up the world of the maids’ playacting and establishing how real the game becomes for them every time, which helps to leave an audience feeling just as jarred as they do when snapped back to reality.

The mistress is a deeply complex character, with so much to unpack. Having quickly identified the relationship between her feeling out of control and using the maids like chess pieces to reclaim her power, we delved deeper to find many unexpected layers. Of course, like all humans, she has many insecurities and is capable of feeling very lonely so her actions come from all kinds of motivations.  The journey of discovering these motivations has been really exciting, and imperative in pinpointing how we reach the climax of events that lead to someone’s demise.

If people draw things from what we have done and think about power and human behaviour, then great. But it’s the kind of play that just happens before your eyes - it is brutal and wild. It’s beautiful and ugly. I’m ready for audiences to run away with it.

The Maids runs at Jermyn Street Theatre from 9 – 22 January, then at Reading Rep Theatre from 28 January - 8 February.

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