The Maids
Captioned performance: 17th November 2025 at 7.30pm
Audio-described performance: 22nd November 2025 at 2.30pm
Two maids enact the murder of their employer… fantasy and reality start to blur…
Jean Genet’s play is re-imagined by Kip Williams.
(seen at the preview performance on 16th October 2025)
Social division has never been wider than now. There is an increasingly tiny number of people who can afford to buy homes and live a comfortable lifestyle. This minority are mainly the ruling class, and they happily “punch down” on everybody else.
Resentment from those on the receiving end is growing, as the rise in support of the Reform Party shows. The mass population simply want those who rule them gone, whatever the cost may be.
Jean Genet’s original play explored this important cultural phenomenon in 1947. Kip Williams brings it up to date in a fashionable London boudoir, ruled by a spoilt mistress, deeply resented – to the point of murder plotting – by her two sister maids.
Williams early on makes the point of how the callous rich depersonalise everybody else. Maids Solange and Clare (Phia Saban and Lydia Wilson) are so anonymous to Mistress (Yerin Ha) that they themselves forget who they are – and the programme does not list character names at all.
It is a disconcerting triangle, constantly shattering and reassembling – sometimes within a single sentence. Flirtations with power and release are built and crushed, the claustrophobia sets in early and, when vented in extraordinary fashion, returns with crushing brutality.
Saban and Wilson prowl around each other constantly, physically and psychologically. Ha’s arrival merely adds menace and despair to that dance, her boyfriend’s evasion of justice a fascinating subplot ingredient.
There is nothing to choose between performances. As Rosanna Vize’s set design, they are angled mirrors; as Zakk Hein’s video designs, heightened real and virtual representations.
All share the same qualities of humanity – only position and the power it endows alters their relationships, and the battle and flux rarely less than intrigue.
Vize and Williams do take the staging a little far in the first veiled scenes, almost impossible to see if you are at an unlucky angle - which depends on where the curtain folds are.
There is also a little further tightening required, perhaps, in the second to fifth scene’s pacing. Worth staying with, as the rewards are great.
With plenty to say about inequality, and performed with anarchic elegance, sometimes a play just captures the zeitgeist. This is one of those times.
The monkey advises checking performance times on your tickets and that performances are happening as scheduled, before travelling.
| Run Time: | Runs 1 hour 50 minutes, with no interval |
| Monday: | 7.30pm |
| Tuesday: | 7.30pm |
| Wednesday: | 7.30pm |
| Thursday: | 2.30pm, 7.30pm |
| Friday: | 7.30pm |
| Saturday: | 2.30pm, 7.30pm |
| Sunday: | X |
Venue Box Office & Current Prices
0844 871 7624Venue box office details and show price charts are available on the Donmar Warehouse Theatre page.
Availability: Box office discretion
Price: £60, £45, £25, £15
Notes: For all performances EXCEPT on Press Night. Every day at 10am, a number of tickets at all prices will be released for the corresponding day the following week, bookable by phone 020 3282 3808 or online www.donmarwarehouse.com.
Address: 41 Earlham Street, London, WC2H 9LX
Box Office: 0844 871 7624
More details: Seats to buy or avoid at this venue plus travel information and other details can be found on the Donmar Warehouse Theatre page
