 The Domestiques is one of those rare festival shows that defies easy categorisation and that’s exactly what makes it so thrilling. With razor-sharp performances and daring shifts in genre and staging, it constantly wrong-foots the audience, keeping us laughing, gasping, and questioning what we’re watching.
Inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids - his anti-capitalist, metatheatrical response to the Papin murders of 1930s France, which he interpreted as an act of political and social rebellion and this production takes those same themes of class, violence, and desire and pushes them into even wilder, darker territory. At its heart, two maids (Kayla Dobbs & Aviana Glover) enact a sadomasochistic fever dream: plotting the murder of their Southern dixie employer, the Senator’s wife (Venus Cobb), who our maids have recently betrayed after they leaked evidence of his crimes. However, he’s walked free, he’s on his way home, and their revenge fantasy spirals into something far more dangerous and desperate. As the boundary between imagination and reality fractures, both the characters and the audience are pulled into a dizzying blur of truth, power, and desire. Under the sharp direction of Rory Leech and with Venus Cobb’s bold and amazing writing, The Domestiques unravels as a heady, unsettling exploration of class, desire, and blurred identities. At its centre are two working-class maids, played with frenetic energy and devastatingly vulnerable, who confront their own reflection and asking what their maids uniform has stripped from them. Their sense of self is chipped away by the Senator’s wife, whose genteel Southern charm barely conceals the serrated edge of belittlement. Wrapped in the sheen of a performative “white feminism” that refuses to extend to the working classes, she toys with them through a mix of jokes and cruelty. Thanks to the razor-sharp delivery of the cast, these scenes land with a laugh before curdling into something far darker and more tragic, as the maids scramble to meet her every whim, their dignity dissolving with every command and put down. What begins as farce soon twists into desperation. Within the confines of the boudoir, role-play becomes both theatre and confession, a frantic rehearsal for revenge. The maids slip in and out of identities - are they sisters or lovers which keeps the audience constantly wrong-footed. Their fantasies bleed into reality, exposing how power dynamics do not only run between master and servant, but emerge insidiously even among peers. This is role-play as survival, as rebellion, as self-annihilation. The cast and creative team with their fearless energy and inventive approach to form recalls the audacious spirit of fringe festival royalty Xhloe and Natasha, who have long been celebrated for pushing theatrical boundaries. Their performances are equally daring, emotionally raw, and unafraid to inhabit the messy, morally complex inner lives of their characters. Watching this performance, it’s easy to imagine this talent as the next breakout stars of the fringe, ready to command stages with the same intensity, inventiveness, and charisma. The performances are nothing short of extraordinary: raw, intense, and unflinchingly physical. In the intimate staging, every flicker of sorrow and surge of fury is laid bare, and the precision use of spotlighting heightens the sense that we are voyeurs. This bedroom and play becomes an experimental playground, where gender, sexuality, and solidarity blur and mutate in unforgettable ways. Lee Hutchison 5/5 The Domestiques Venue: Stephenson Theatre at theSpace @ Surgeons' Hall Dates: August 22-24th Time: 2200 Tickets: www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/the-domestiques |
|
