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Screens were essential to Kip Williams’ one-woman adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Sarah Snook played 26 parts. That hurricane of a play from Sydney stormed the West End with its innovative and immaculately timed technology. Screens feature just as extravagantly in this three-hander that sweeps you into its turbulence at relentless speed.
Written and directed by Williams, this new version is a brash, eye-popping take on Jean Genet’s 1947 drama about two maids (and sisters) who engage in dangerous master-servant games and role play. Where some of the original subtleties around power and eroticism are lost, the technology audaciously employed here – live smartphone footage projected on to the back panels of the set – captures the fevered fantasy that drives the engine of the play as the sisters slip in and out of make-believe rebellion against their mistress, referred to as “Madame”.
Williams gives a modern meaning to the play through the technology itself: influencer image-making and online celebrity culture are critiqued. The analogy is obvious, once it is introduced, and ingenious. The faces of actors are digitally augmented on screens so they look like Botoxed versions of themselves – or their own alien avatars. They are also shown through a distorted filter so they look less human. The slippages into fantasy, for all three women, are into a curated online space of augmented reality and performance.
It speaks of our world of fillers, liposuction and Ozempic, but sticks faithfully to Genet’s storyline, from the poison tea that the sisters plot to give Madame, as a way of finding freedom from bondage, and to the anonymous letter they write to the police incriminating her embezzling boyfriend (here it’s an email).
The psychological violence takes place amid the bubble-gum pink of a billionaire heiress’s bedroom. Claire (Lydia Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban) initially look like teenagers at a pyjama party playing with their iPhones. Wilson, pretending to be the disdainful Madame, does diva and porn star moves to the St Matthew Passion (the music ranges from Swan Lake to thumping house music) while Saban, as a cringing maid in rubber gloves, becomes human spittle on her boots. The melodrama of this fantasy of dominance and subservience is played out for real when Madame (Yerin Ha) enters the bedroom. She is silly, spoiled, hyperbolic and monstrous.
The pumping music and Insta imagery wobbling in the hands of characters as they film themselves gives the play its hallucinatory, unravelling quality. You feel its discombobulations, but maybe because of the speed of delivery, the dynamic between the women is not fully unpicked. It is evident that the sisters are umbilically tied but there is little exploration of their incestuous undercurrent.
Madame is a comical Cruella de Vil in leather shorts, childish in her narcissism, stomping one minute, giggling the next. She brings a familiar caricature of an influencer and daddy’s girl yet it undercuts her fearful tyranny over the maids. So you see the parody of the sisters’ enslavement through their role play but not quite the enslavement itself, perhaps because Madame is so puerile and prone to tantrums – or maybe this is what modern-day tyranny looks like.
There are storming performances, especially from Saban and Wilson, and a hurtling dread as the projections become wilder, the set seeming to disassemble as their inner worlds crack apart. Rosanna Vize’s thrust stage, wrapped in gauze curtains and mirrors, implicates us as “followers” peeping into this virtual world even as it crashes. It is draining, discomfiting, exhilarating. Snook won an Olivier award for Williams’ last show. Wilson and Saban deserve the same for their breathless, breathtaking performances.
