The Maids (Trafalgar Studios, 12 May)

A headache, sometimes in ways that were interesting. There is definitely a Jamie Lloyd company schtick: famous actors from the teevee, claustrophobia-inducing music; subtlety hunted down and shouted to death. I think this worked well for The Homecoming a few months ago, since Pinter is never far away from MEN SHOUTING ABOUT THE SHOUTING. Where the Pinter made me feel clenched and terrible for days afterwards, though, here I felt mostly exhausted after about fifteen minutes in. The actors playing the maids--Crazy Eyes from Orange is the New Black is one of them--were forced to run around the stage, often right around the edges, by the decision to place the audience on both sides of them. They really, truly gave it their all in the midst of a set lit for some reason like the last number in Magic Mike: XXL. There were even flickers in the final ten minutes of what might have been--a quiet exploration of self-inflicted service-class brutality--if they’d ever eased the acting down from eleven and let the actors stop running wind sprints.

There’s this thing I’ve seen now some umpteen of times, in London and Stratford, where a play is trying to connote being contemporary and edgy through a weirdly precise shopping list of stage effects. For some reason the archangel of overrated British everything, Alexander McQueen--namechecked twice in this translation--hovers over a lot of these plays. But the recipe loosely includes neon lights in terrible colors and--most irritatingly-- throbbing Simian Mobile Disco-ish music brought on at parts to suggest that THIS IS A REALLY INTENSE PART AND ALSO KIND OF SHOWS YOU THAT THE SYSTEM IS DEHUMANIZING INNIT? It plays in practice like a laugh track indicating unpleasantness. Music that people my age think of as gritty and confrontational and sexy--Peaches, for heaven’s sake--plays at the beginning and end. And it’s nice, as a person of a certain age, to be made to feel like a with-it hedonist. I don’t know why the director didn’t want us to think too much, but heaven knows we didn’t.
And oh, poor Lady Edith: unlucky in voice coaches, as in love. Playing the mistress, she has settled (well, mostly) on a sort of Minnesotan Jewish Princess accent. When I used to live in Chicago, I would wince at the British accents; this was better than that, while still not being precisely how humans talk. Some of that is the point; but the performance overall felt like a technical exercise--like a gynamistics routine in chirpy Midwestern evil--more than anything else. At the end of the play she was made to bow to both sides of the audience in a knicker-revealing outfit; the audience dutifully clapped and, yes, we got to see ‘em twice.

This is some the second Genet piece I’ve seen in the last few weeks, and I’m not sure that London theatre at the moment is really getting him. A strong Deatchwatch at the Coronet was marred by actors who looked like members of the same rugby team; their febrile gaslight masculinity seemed to involve a lot of creatine. Here I confess I thought more about upskirt fetishism--the play is replete--than about the daily ritual of the class system or whatever. There are moments where I felt kind of nauseous at the sheer shouty energy the actors brought; but just feeling uncomfortable doesn't make for a great theatrical outing.