Two maids both love and hate their mistress. They have denounced her lover to the police by means of anonymous letters. Upon learning that he is to be released for lack of proof, they realise that their betrayal will be discovered, and they try to murder Madame.They fail and want to kill themselves. Finally, one of them takes her life, and the other, left alone and drunk with glory, tries, by the pomp of her posturings and language, to be equal to the magnificent destiny that awaits her.
The style of Jean Genet’s The Maids, with its detours and mystifications, is taken over and consumed by its extraordinary perception of pain, concentrated and focused as if under a burning-glass. Its superficial puzzlement – the swap-
ping of identities between the two maids who dream of killing their mistress – is the thinnest of veils over its terrifying directness. It is one of the most unremittingly moving works in the modernist repertory.