The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays

by Jean Genet and Jean Paul ) Genet, Jean ( Sartre

Book Overview

The two plays collected in this volume represent Genet's first attempts to analyze the mores of a bourgeois society he had previously been content simply to vilify. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080215056X
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.5" x 5.4"

Customer Reviews

The Mirror And Its Reality

There was a time when I would read anything the playwright Jean Genet wrote, especially his plays. The reason? Well, for one thing, the political thing that has been the core of my existence since I was a kid, his relationship to the Black Panthers when they were being systematically lionized by the international white left as the "real" revolutionaries and systematically liquidated by the American state police apparatus that was hell-bend on putting every young black man with a black beret behind bars, or better, as with Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and long list of others, dead. Genet, as his autobiographical "Our Lady Of The Flowers" details came from deep within a white, French version of that same lumpen "street" milieu from which the Panthers were recruiting. Thus, kindred spirits. That kindred "street" smart relationship, of course, was like catnip for a kid like me who came from that same American societal intersection, the place where the white lumpen thug elements meet the working poor. I knew the American prototype of Jean Genet, up close and personal, except, perhaps, for his own well-publicized homosexuality and that of others among the dock-side toughs that he hung around with. So I was ready for a literary man who was no stranger to life's seamy side. His play "The Maids" was the first one I grabbed (and I believe the first of his plays that I saw performed). Fortunately, by the time that I got around to then reading (and seeing) such seemingly avant-garde material I had shed my prissy Catholic ignorance about the great varieties of human sexual expression, for good and evil. Otherwise, I would not have appreciated this play as either a perverse form of class struggle (the story line centers on the plot of two interchangeable maids, sisters, although the performance that I saw had the two maids played by men) to "murder" their mistress. Or as a ritualistic sadomasochistic sexual exercise. Either way this play still holds up today as a very well thought through literary effort, at a time when seemingly every offbeat sexual expression has been ground to bits through banal exploitation. See this one, the next time it is revived, if you get a change. In the meantime read the text.

Knowing the score

That's 3 stars for "Deathwatch" and 7 stars for "The Maids", for an average of 5 stars. It's not that "Deathwatch" is mediocre, it's just "The Maids" is that good. If you can't find a performance, you may still be able to see "The Maids" performed as it has been available on VHS and DVD. The American Film Theatre presented the play in movie theatres back in the 70's. Not as a loose film adaptation of the play, but retaining the play's script by filming it. Solange and Claire were played by Glenda Jackson and Susannah York. I saw it but it was so long ago all I remember was its power. Who, when honest, likes their job and the inevitable kowtowing to the boss? B.F. Skinner in "Science and Human Behavior" wrote: "Payment of wages is an obvious advance over slavery, but the use of a standard wage as something which may be discontinued unless the employee works in a given manner is not too great an advance." Solange and Claire at least understand the tensions in boss-employee relationships. Each realizes how easy it is to lose oneself in a role. Have we, in adjusting to meet our boss's expectations, internalized too well what it is to be the boss? But the extent to which our need to work shapes who we are isn't something we are usually conscious of. Perhaps it would be too painful. The desire to be like the boss, the resentment of the boss, the confusion due to our jobs about who we really are: this and more is explored by Genet thru Solange and Claire. Brilliant insights, brilliant language. Our unnoticed thoughts made explicit in ceremony by these maids: we fail to see ourselves performing at all. Not like you? Read or watch again.

5 stars for 'the Maids'

I have not read 'Deathwatch' yet but the'Maids' lived up to what I was expecting from Genet. To learn more about Genet, I would highly recommend his biography by Edmund White - this is one of the best biographies I have read. The 'Maids' is a play in one act with three charactors. Within this act Genet captures the role-playing of the classes of society rather brilliantly. He does not capitalize on the brutality of the actual case of murder (it is based on an actual murder) but looks instead at the motivations for doing it. There is a film adaptation of the story called 'Murderous Maids' which is pretty good but focuses mainly on the act of murder - and throws in a lesbian twist.

Horrific , violent existentialism at its most absurd.

Genet based 'The Maids' on an actual event, one he felt a certain kin-ship with. In 1933 french police found Madame Lancelin and her daughter face down, in their living room, utterly mutilated. The eyes had disappeared, all teeth had been knocked out, fragments of bone and flesh were strewn about the floor, walls covered in blood. Upstairs the two servant-maids, the Papin sisters, were found naked, huddled together in one of two single beds. Immediately they confessed. Immediately, also, the papers picked up the story. The public was facinated how these two soft-spoken, mild-mannered girls, without provocation could have acted with such wild brutality. Senseless, irrational violence - Genet's speciality. He uses this story as a means to attack conformaty. A massive revolt against obedience, servitude, and the upperclass. A bloody triumph of individuality . Like other of Genet's works, it primaraly is concerned with Man's free will, or lack there-of. It is an existential story , revealing the darker sides of freedom, and the horror of the responsibility that comes with it. A tale worthy of Genet's genious. Exellent translation. Fans of Genet should also Check out Octave Mirbeau.