Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam in The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo supplied.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There’s something exactly right about entering the theatre through an unmarked door, down the stairs and into a space that invites reinvention and expands before your very eyes. It’s a world ready and waiting for actors to play in.
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The Pendennis Building downtown is where Putrid Brat, a new Edmonton indie theatre, introduces itself by producing an unsettling play that will fray the edges of your nerves (how quintessentially bratty is that?). That Jean Genet’s The Maids, forever young at 77 years old, is a piece all about performance, its seductions, its dangers, its artifices and limitations, is an intriguing calling card from two young actors, Julia van Dam and Hannah Wigglesworth, with director David Kennedy.
It’s a complicated game that Genet’s two maids play, a ceremony in which they take turns playing the mistress they both despise and idolize, and they play each other too. Claire (van Dam) and Solange (Wigglesworth) exist on a densely layered plane of adulation and grievance, oppression and fury. In a space that’s both claustrophobic and too big for them, they create their own theatre of sliding identity, in which their oft-rehearsed script leaks at the seams. And they dream, in a complex way, both of violence and love, homicidal revenge and emulation, a bloodstream of revolution.
Hannah Wigglesworth and Julia van Dam in The Maids, Putrid Brat. Photo by Kyle Tobiasson and PoppyRose Media
I had a chance, late in the run — and you have the chance till Sunday — to watch two very skilled actors in this tricky assignment. In the opening scene Van Dam (we’ll see her next week in Northern Light’s new Trevor Schmidt play Monstress) and Wigglesworth as Claire and Solange are in heightened mid-performance as the aggrieved maids. Claire plays the cruel, sneering Mistress and Solace is Claire, so reviled she’s not even fit to kiss the Mistress’s shoe.
“Take up the slack, you slut,” Mistress commands servant. “If you insist on snivelling, then snivel in your attic.” The translation by Brit playwright Martin Crimp has a kind of muscular danger, and humour, of its own.
When the Mistress herself comes home, you hear in Alexandra Dawkins’ detailed comic performance the noblesse oblige notes her maids have sounded and exaggerated in their impersonation — power wielded by the iron hand in the velvet glove, yes, and also condescension ambiguously camouflaged as disarming kindness. In the performance the Mistress projects a kind of vulnerability to men, to the servant class; it’s lethal to the maids’ plans, and she overplays self-consciously for her own benefit. In the dangerous game of attraction/revulsion, aggression and retreat, the maids have raised the stakes in their latest move, which they analyze over and over.
This intricate network of role-playing, alterations, second thoughts, reversals, in a world where fury and fear are in a tug-of-war for supremacy, is captured in Kennedy’s production.
Putrid Brat has attracted a top creative to their debut passion project: Kennedy’s direction, Even Gilchrist’s scenic design, Beyata Hackborn’s costumes, Nick Kourtides’s sinister sound design. And you have the opportunity to see two remarkable, and enterprising, actors at work. Keep your eye on these U of A theatre grads. They’re going places.
The Maids runs through Sunday at the Pendennis Building, 9660 Jasper Ave. Tickets: www.showpass.com/themaids/
