Yesterday I finished reading Les Bonnes, the first play on the reading list for the 20th century French Theater and Performance course that I’m working through. I also watched a filmed version of the unusual 2011 production of Les Bonnes, directed by Jacques Vincey. The play was written in 1947 by Jean Genet and saw its first production that same year at Théâtre de l’Athénée, under the direction of Louis Jouvet. (I’ve encountered Jouvet’s name several times, more as an actor than as a director, though I gather he was quite renowned in both roles. Jouvet was famous enough that the theater has been renamed “Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis-Jouvet” and the plaza it faces renamed “Square de l’Opéra-Louis-Jouvet”). Les Bonnes is a warhorse in the repertoire of French theater. Wikipedia lists 10 notable productions since 1970, and my own web search revealed dozens of others at all levels of professional, amateur, and student theater. It has been translated into English as “The Maids”, which has been regularly performed since 1952. There are film adaptations of both the French and English versions, as well as many video recordings of live theater productions. The play is assigned reading au lycée for many French high school students. In short, a classic.
The play has three characters: Claire, Solange, and Madame. Claire and Solange are sisters, and work as maids for an haute bourgeoise woman known to us only as Madame. The place and time period are unspecified, but it’s French enough for there to be mansards, balls, operas, fancy dresses and furs; modern enough for there to be a telephone in the house; and ancient enough that there are no labor-saving electrical household appliances, leaving the onerous work to the maids. The two sisters hate their life as impoverished, dependent maids, hate Madame, and to some degree also hate each other and themselves. There’s a lot of hate to spread around. One gathers they have been in this situation for years and developed some deep-seated pathologies. Over the course of the play, we learn that Claire and Solange have managed to have Madame’s husband falsely imprisoned based on their own anonymous accusations. The maids are now conspiring to murder Madame herself. Although Jean Genet insists that his play was not inspired by it, there was a well publicized murder by two maids, the sisters Léa and Christine Papin, that transpired in western France in 1933.
The play is structured in three scenes, although no explicit boundaries are provided in the text. In the first scene, Claire and Solange are engaged in a role-playing game for their own benefit, with Solange pretending to be Madame and Claire pretending to be Solange. Claire dresses up in Madame’s clothing, puts on her makeup, and ironically adopts her airs and unconscious arrogance. Exactly why Solange pretends to be Claire rather than herself is never clear, although it contributes to the overall theme of confusing fantasy with reality. The two heap insults and derision on each other and play-act the strangulation of Madame, while also sporadically dropping out of the game to discuss what to portray next or to remark on their unrolling murder plot. A phone call interrupts them: it’s Monsieur, announcing that he’s just been released from prison and requesting that Madame meet him at a restaurant to celebrate. As the expected time of Madame’s return approaches, Claire and Solange end their game, hurriedly restore Madame’s things to their usual places, and otherwise hide traces of their mummery.
The second scene begins as Madame enters (after a failed attempt to visit her husband in prison), still unaware of Monsieur’s release. We now get to see the real interactions between Madame and the maids, which is not far off from the play-acting of scene one although the maids must be more circumspect and subservient in expressing their opprobrium for Madame. Claire prepares poisoned tea, but the two sisters are unsuccessful in maneuvering Madame to drink it. Madame notices many of the things that are awry in her bedroom after the play-acting and starts to suspect that her maids may be misbehaving, possibly even to the point of listening at doors and rifling through sensitive papers. Worried that Madame will realize they must be the source of the anonymous accusations about Monsieur, the sisters distract her with news of Monsieur’s release and the phone message requesting a rendez-vous. Madame is overjoyed and rushes off to meet him, despite the maids’ attempts to delay her long enough to drink the tea.
In the third scene Claire and Solange rip into each other, venomously trading blame for who botched the assassination and who left suspicion-raising evidence of their role-playing. Solange urges them to flee the house, but Claire despondently points out they are trapped by their poverty. The sisters fall back into their fantasy games, but this time with a harder edge. Solange performs a more realistic strangling of Claire-as-Madame, though it is still a mock killing. Solange then bitterly denounces Madame for couching her condescension in terms of kindness and generosity. She apostrophizes at length that she will no longer tolerate going through life bent over, but will stand up straight from now on. Claire resuscitates from her faux-death and insists that they enact the poison drinking scene that failed materialize. Solange is resistant, but finally agrees to serve Claire/Madame the poisoned tea. Claire knowingly drinks the poison and actually dies as Solange imagines herself in handcuffs and the play ends.
I understood most of this material in my first reading of the text, but was confused at a couple of levels. First, it was very unclear from the text which words are intended to be spoken “in real life” from one character to another, which are spoken “in the game”, and which are spoken as an aside to the theatrical audience. Often a single speaker turn contains two or three of these, with no stage directions indicating which words belong in which frame. Some critics assert this is a deliberate editing choice intended to give to a reader the same ambiguity between fantasy and reality that a spectator would have watching the show, and that the characters have in their fictional lives. Second, there are definitely sexual undercurrents in many of the interactions between Claire and Solange, but my French is not strong enough to know where the subtext is glaringly obvious, where the meaning is more implicit, and where I invented hidden meaning when none exists. So, my next stop was to watch a performance of the play.
The performance listed in the course materials is a professionally filmed recording of a 2011 production directed by Jacques Vincey. I watched it (text in hand) and got a very different sense of the play than I had by simply reading it. The print edition I have begins with a five page note from the author: Comment jouer «Les Bonnes» (“How to perform The Maids”). It declares that the atmosphere should be furtive and that the maids should be proper, yet still sexual, but not overtly erotic. The author also acknowledges that the dialogue may not be a realistic representation of how maids talk when they aren’t observed, but asserts that when he goes to the theater he wants to see himself on stage, stripped of conventions and niceties, naked. Director Jacques Vincey decided to start his 2011 production with an abridged version of this note recited by a completely naked man who does not otherwise figure in the rest of the show (though I believe he participates later as clothed stage hand). This introductory scene is presumably why the video merits a YouTube warning “This video contains content that may be offensive to some viewers. Are you sure you want to proceed?”, which also prevents it from being embedded on this page. You’ll have to click the link if you want to see stage directions recited nude.
The Jacques Vincey production is highly stylized with stark sets, dark lighting, minimal costuming, and eerie music. Almost all props are absent, replaced by pantomime. Many lines are spoken slowly with an emotionless, dispassionate affect, while others are delivered in a stentorian shout. I don’t know enough to be confident that labeling this production “avant garde” is formally accurate, but that description will give a non-professional the right impression. I came away from watching it with the thought “Ah, I see, that’s what this play is. An abstract psycho-drama infused with social commentary, class politics, and post-war despair. Got it.”
Only it turns out, this description is heavily influenced by the directorial choices of the production. I was fortunate enough to wonder if this is how it’s always played and looked for other recording of other productions. I found dozens of them on the web, both complete shows and excerpts. They illustrate a wide range of stylistic interpretations of the text, among which Jacques Vincey’s is an outlier. There are productions with more traditional, fully realized sets, props, and costumes. There are productions with less overtly deranged portrayals of Claire and Solange. There are productions where the maids are younger or prettier, ones where Madame is more natural or more horrible, ones that emphasize or ignore the sexual tension in Claire and Solange’s play-acting. There are productions set in prison. By far the oddest one I found was a production by Centaur Theater where the actors are on horses most of the time.
All in all Les Bonnes (and Jacques Vincey’s production) was an unusual and satisfying first dish in the nine course meal that I’ve ordered for myself. And I’ve been reminded that not only must one not judge a book by its cover, but one must also not judge a classic play by just one of its productions.
Next week: L’Amante anglaise, by Marguerite Duras.