The Maids (French: Les Bonnes) is a 1947 play by French dramatist Jean Genet. It opened at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris on 17 April 1947 under the direction of Louis Jouvet. The piece has been revived across France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—sometimes with men playing the maid roles. A Danish TV dramatization, Stuepigerne, aired on Danmarks Radio in 1962; a major English-language film adaptation followed in the mid-1970s; Swedish composer Peter Bengtson turned the play into a chamber opera in 1994. For readers who track BDSM-adjacent literature and power-exchange theater, The Maids is a foundational text of ritual dominance, role swap, erotic humiliation, and murder fantasy inside domestic service.
Background: The Papin Sisters and Sartre’s Casting Speculation
Genet loosely based the play on the infamous sisters Christine and Léa Papin, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. That real crime supplies the psychic voltage—servants, mistress, class hatred, and spectacular violence—without turning the script into a documentary. In an introduction to The Maids, Jean-Paul Sartre quotes a line from Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers in which a character muses that if he had a play written for women he would cast adolescent boys in the parts. Sartre then toys with applying that idea to The Maids itself—seed for decades of cross-gender and drag-inflected productions that treat the maids’ femininity as costume and ceremony rather than naturalist fact.
Plot: Roleplay Across the Power Divide
Solange and Claire are sister housemaids. When their mistress (Madame) is away, they take turns playing Madame while the other plays maid. Each, as Madame, demeans and abases her sister. The exchanges carry a “furtive” eroticism—service, insult, costume, and emotional sadism as sexual charge. Their ultimate goal is the real murder of Madame, imagined as the only exit from subjugation. But the maids’ deliberate pace, emotionally charged arguments, and devotion to ceremonial detail guarantee that they always fail to complete the fantasy “killing” at the ritual’s climax—with unexpected consequences when fantasy and real hierarchy collide.
For kink readers, the play is less a how-to than a pure diagram of D/s theater: top and bottom roles circulate between two bottoms of the social order; the absent Mistress is both hated object and erotic template; “killing Madame” is the scene end that never safely lands. Protocol, costume, scripted insult, and failed climax are the structure of the evening.
Characters
- Solange — maid / sister; switches between servant and tyrant in the ritual
- Claire — maid / sister; mirrors and contests Solange across the same power divide
- Madame — haughty, disdainful mistress; the real top whose absence fuels the sisters’ game
- Monsieur — Madame’s lover and a thief; offstage pressure on the household’s moral and criminal economy
Early British and American Productions
In Britain the play first appeared in French under the Institute of Contemporary Arts, initially at the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, London, in 1952. Peter Zadek directed; Eduardo Paolozzi designed. Selma Vaz Dias played Solange, Olive Gregg Claire, Oriel Ross Madame. The production transferred to the Royal Court Theatre with Betty Stockfeld as Madame and scenic design by David de Bethel. Zadek also directed the first British production in English, opening 5 June 1956 at the New Lindsey Theatre Club—Vaz Dias again as Solange, Stockfeld as Madame, Hazel Penwarden as Claire.
In New York, Tempo Playhouse staged the play in 1955 with Julie Bovasso first as Claire and later as Solange. Bovasso won the first best actress Obie Award for The Maids—an early Off-Broadway signal that Genet’s servant sadism landed as serious modern theater, not only foreign scandal. Minos Volanakis directed at the Oxford Playhouse in 1963; the production returned in 1964 double-billed with Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule.
1970s Screen and Later Landmark Revivals
London’s Greenwich Theatre revived the play in 1973 with Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange, and Susannah York as Claire. That cast was filmed for the American Film Theatre series in 1974 (often dated 1975 in release materials), directed by Christopher Miles and shot by Douglas Slocombe. Miles and Slocombe planned a twelve-day shoot with a single camera that could track anywhere over the set, deliberately importing Genet’s theatrical devices into cinema. The film is the best-known English-language screen version for many Anglophone viewers who first meet the maids’ SM-coded rituals on video rather than on stage.
The 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Barbican (The Pit), directed by Gerard Murphy and designed by David Ultz, cast Miles Anderson as Claire, Murphy as Solange, and Patrick Bailey as Madam—male performers in the maid and mistress roles—and twinned the show with Genet’s Deathwatch. Clare Davidson directed a production that moved from Dublin Theatre Festival to the Lyric Theatre Studio Hammersmith on 12 October 1981, with Mark Rylance as Madame—another high-profile male casting of the mistress. Roman Viktyuk’s 1988 staging at the Satirikon Theatre became a Russian landmark: expressive, visually extreme, androgynous style blending Valentin Gneushev’s physical training, Alla Sigalova’s choreography, and Asaf Faradzhov’s music. For more than thirty-five years it stayed in repertoire and is still associated with The Melnikov Stage (formerly the Roman Viktyuk Theatre).
Cesear’s Forum in Chicago (1990) cast Claire and Solange as male actors in drag while keeping Madame female. Critic Albert Williams in the Chicago Reader linked that choice to Genet’s desire for ceremony “like the sacrifice of the Mass,” with endless role-shifting and patent artificiality of female impersonation as the poetic means of the themes. In Canada, a 2011 Buddies in Bad Times production in Toronto mixed female and male casting: Diane D’Aquila and Ron Kennell as Solange and Claire.
Twenty-First-Century Star Vehicles
A 2013 Sydney Theatre Company production, adapted by Andrew Upton and directed by Benedict Andrews, starred Cate Blanchett as Claire, Isabelle Huppert as Solange, and Elizabeth Debicki as the Mistress. It reached New York’s Lincoln Center Festival in August 2014 at City Center. Andrews mixed theater and film devices—video cameras, stylized choreography, underground pop soundtracks, liberal profanity, and modern quips (the Mistress tossing off that McQueen designed a dress for her). In 2016, Jamie Lloyd directed Uzo Aduba and Zawe Ashton as Solange and Claire with Laura Carmichael as Mistress at Trafalgar Studios in London, using the same translation as the Andrews/Blanchett version. In Australia, a 2021 Hobart Playhouse staging directed by Ben Winspear featured Marta Dusseldorp and Essie Davis as the sisters and Stephanie Jack as Mistress.
Power, Ritual, and an SM Reading
Genet’s maids do not need a dungeon to stage dominance and submission. Costume, voice, posture, timed insult, and the fantasy of murder-as-climax do the work. Each sister rehearses both sides of the whip hand; the real Madame’s return always threatens to collapse the game; the erotic charge of service is never cleanly separated from class hatred. Cross-gender casting—boy maids, male Madame, drag Claire and Solange—only sharpens the point that gender and status here are props in a ceremony of power, not stable identities. Adult audiences who map literary and theatrical BDSM often place The Maids beside other Genet works and beside later films of domestic D/s and roleplay murder fantasy: not lifestyle instruction, but a merciless template for how two people can build a private theater of tops and bottoms until the script demands blood.
Why the Play Still Matters on a Kink Map
From Jouvet’s 1947 premiere through Obie-winning Off-Broadway, Jackson/York film, RSC male casting, Viktyuk’s androgynous Russian marathon, and star turns by Blanchett, Huppert, Aduba, and others, The Maids keeps returning because the power ritual still works. Related keywords: Jean Genet Les Bonnes, Papin sisters drama, sadomasochistic roleplay theater, Glenda Jackson Susannah York Maids, Benedict Andrews Blanchett Huppert. For BDSM literature and performance readers, it remains essential: service as erotic ceremony, humiliation as sisterly intimacy, and a murder scene that never quite completes—until the world outside the game forces a different ending.
