Our Festival 2026 Production

The Maids

By Jean Genet

Archangel, Frome.

3rd, 4th and 5th July, 2026.

Directed by Martin Scott.

Starring: Kara Horler as Claire, Natalie Ward as Solange and Thea Pfaum as Madame.

Jean Genet (1910–1986): French playwright, novelist and poet who transformed a life of marginalisation and incarceration into some of the most powerful theatre of the twentieth century. A one-time thief, queer outsider and social radical, Genet’s plays are not naturalistic dramas — they are stylised, symbolic and ritualistic, exploring power, identity, violence and desire.

About the Play: The Maids (1947) was inspired by the real-life Papin sisters, two maids who murdered their employer and her daughter in 1930s France. Genet transforms this event into something stranger and more ritualistic.

Claire and Solange — sisters and domestic workers — enact elaborate roleplays whenever their employer, Madame, leaves the house. Claire plays Madame, while Solange plays the servant. They rehearse humiliation, revenge and murder. But these aren’t simply games. They are rituals, coping mechanisms, and acts of rebellion.

The play blurs fantasy and reality until it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is truly happening and what is imagined. It is a haunting psychological drama about envy, identity and power — deeply theatrical and open to creative reinterpretation.

Production Concept: A Somerset Setting.

This production relocates the play to a present-day Somerset market town. Claire and Solange are local working-class women, employed on zero-hours cleaning contracts. Madame is a wealthy incomer — a spiritually-curated, Babington-House-adjacent figure “down from London”: well-meaning but blind to her privilege.

The entire play takes place in Madame’s bedroom, filled with shabby-chic décor, dried flowers and new-age aesthetics — a carefully curated space of calm that conceals deep inequality. The bedroom becomes stage, shrine and trap. To reflect contemporary communication, the production replaces letters and landlines with voicenotes, livestreams and projected text messages. A large window (doubling as a digital screen) allows Madame and her lover to appear via livestream — ever-present but rarely embodied.

These choices bring Genet’s themes of performance, surveillance and social identity into the digital age.

Our Autumn 2026 Production

Season’s Greetings, by Alan Ayckbourn.

Details to follow!