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St. Ann’s Warehouse’s 2025-26 season will culminate with The Donmar Warehouse’s production of The Maids, Jean Genet’s masterpiece of class struggle and blurred identity, in a new version written and directed by Kip Williams. Following his international triumph with The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was nominated for six 2025 Tony Awards and won Sarah Snook the Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play, Williams resets Genet’s 1947 classic squarely in the digital age. Performances take place at St. Ann’s Warehouse May 17–June 14.
With their mistress away, two maids act out their darkest fantasies about Madame, their abusive “influencer” employer. They obsessively role play all day long, to the point of “murdering” her, until performance and reality begin to blur. Williams’ contemporary take is a timely parable about modern identity and the destructive desire to both emulate and annihilate those we idolize.
Williams’ production features Phia Saban (House of the Dragon) and Olivier Award nominee Lydia Wilson are the maids, Solange and Claire; and Bridgerton breakout star Yerin Ha is Madame, their mistress.
Williams was drawn to The Maids because it speaks perfectly to this moment in history when people “are living a large portion of their lives online, interacting with each other in an unprecedented way in an abstract, virtual space, and expressing and performing ideas of self within the highly curated framework of that space. And this play is all about that act of performance, about that essential human experience of attempting to perform self for others, and the ways in which that act of performance can open up a chasm between fantasy and reality, between how we want to be seen and who we truly are.” Furthermore, he explains, “our unparalleled access to the lives of others is creating an exacerbated obsession with lives centred around materialism, youth, and beauty…Jean Genet, in the middle of the 20th century, had a somewhat prophetic view of how a society that was obsessed with materialism might unravel, and, unfortunately, he was correct.”
In Williams’ version, featuring video design by Zakk Hein and scenic design by Rosanna Vize, the characters act out and broadcast their fantasies live on their phones. The livestreamed content, filtered to oblivion, looms over Madame’s posh, soulless boudoir, amplifying the treacherous game of dressup unfolding within. Read BroadwayWorld’s review of The Donmar Warehouse production of The Maids HERE!
