The Maids reviews round-up at the Donmar Warehouse in London directed by Kip Williams

"Leaves you dizzy"

"Australian director Kip Williams turns Genet’s psychodrama into a dazzling digital-age headrush"

"You could say that this take on Jean Genet’s 1947 psychodrama of theatrical, erotic and murderous fantasy was A Lot. You might even think it was A Bit Much. But babe, you’d be wrong. It’s way, way more excessive than that – and all the more thrilling for it."

"As in Dorian Gray, the piece unfolds on video and mocked-up social media as well as on stage. The pace is frenetic, the colours vivid, and the overall effect a headrush that leaves you dizzy, dazzled and – I suspect deliberately – faintly nauseous."

"With lip-licking relish and wild, reckless abandonment, all three women take it turns to flip the bitch switch, chattering inanely in text-speak and wellness woo woo... Along with the technical precision required (the intricate video design is by Zakk Hein), it’s an impressive feat of performance."

"... Williams’ experiential production conveys the corrupt value systems and ludicrous hierarchies of much of 21st-century culture with visceral force... It’s draining, it’s overwhelming, it’s kind of gross – and it’s brilliant.

"If you're prepared to surrender, it's a wild ride"

"This adaptation of Jean Genet’s play by Kip Williams makes use of phones to project the fantasy world of two sisters wishing to murder a terrible mistress but the true power is in the performances"

"In Australian auteur Kip Williams’s version, adapted and updated to a world of Instagram followers and filters, and running a high-octane 100 minutes, I finally got it."

"This is a hectic, shouty psychodrama which barrages the audience with emotion and imagery."

"Williams draws powerful and intricately precise performances from a magnetic Lydia Wilson and relative newcomers Phia (House of the Dragon) Saban and Yerin (Bridgerton) Ha."

"It is, frankly, a lot. I kind of loved it."

"The line between fantasy and reality is blurred: the two even confuse their own identities. But the role-play slides sickeningly into the real world."

"The performances are a marvel of speed, focus and technical adroitness. Most of the action has to be mediated not only for its up-close live impact but how it will play out on the footage projected behind."

"This show demands a strong reaction, and I imagine as many will hate it as love it. But if you’re prepared to surrender, it’s a wild ride."

"Dorian Gray’s Kip Williams dazzles again with feverish fantasy"

"There are superb performances in this screen-saturated staging of Jean Genet’s play, updated for the influencer age"

"Screens feature just as extravagantly in this three-hander that sweeps you into its turbulence at relentless speed."

"Written and directed by Williams, this new version is a brash, eye-popping take on Jean Genet’s 1947 drama"

"Williams gives a modern meaning to the play through the technology itself: influencer image-making and online celebrity culture are critiqued."

"The pumping music and Insta imagery wobbling in the hands of characters as they film themselves gives the play its hallucinatory, unravelling quality. You feel its discombobulations, but maybe because of the speed of delivery, the dynamic between the women is not fully unpicked."

"There are storming performances, especially from Saban and Wilson, and a hurtling dread as the projections become wilder"

"Hotly-tipped Aussie director Kip Williams’s live video-centric take on the Jean Genet classic is gloriously lurid"

"... The Maids is his first original UK production. And the question begged is: are all Kip Williams’s shows ‘like that’, in a visual sense? The answer would seem to be ‘basically, yes’."

"Visually it’s loud, garish and kind of basic. Which is a good thing! ... live video is one of the more dominant means of communication on the planet. The fact Williams uses it in a somewhat trashy, teenagery way is fun, reflective of our times, and offers a great way into modernising Genet’s play."

"As well as looking incredible, Williams’s root and branch modern update of Genet’s text is very funny. The maids tear eye-wateringly vicious strips off each other"

"It’s exhilarating, hilarious, horrifying stuff. But the trouble is it doesn’t really have anywhere to go."

"... as with Dorian Gray, there’s a sense that other directors might have found more emotional heft in the material. A tonal gearshift in the middle would have really done so much for it."

"Like being locked in a cupboard with Katie Price"

"Kip Williams’s manic revival of Jean Genet’s psychodrama is packed with clever effects but does nothing to solve the play’s mysteries"

"The set is the winner in this manic update of Jean Genet’s psychodrama, a Gallic exercise in demented role-playing, now given a modern influencer gloss by that ultra-fashionable Australian director and adaptor Kip Williams."

"Williams’s rewrite throws in flurries of references to today’s online world and its jaded hangers-on."

"In the opening barrage of dialogue — both actresses deserve maximum credit for maintaining such a breathless flow of words throughout the evening — they are half-concealed behind a silky curtain."

"But with so little variation in pacing, the exchanges begin to grind us down. The arrival of Yerin Ha’s imperious Madame brings no relief"

"Jean Genet’s drama becomes a vicious satire of the TikTok age"

"The Australian director Kip Williams brings a queasy contemporaneity to the suffocating 1947 play"

"Political metaphor, erotic fantasy, quasi-religious ceremony, it’s still a troubling, provocative watch. Williams’ sugar-rush of a production retools it as a vicious satire of the TikTok age and its distortions of reality."

"Genet’s fascination with performance and identity here re-emerges to embrace the current weird credo that if you are not on show, you somehow don’t exist."

"Genet’s depiction of brittle celebrity, economic inequality and marginalised individuals is made disconcertingly timely by Williams. But the show begins to feel trapped by its own approach."

"Yerin Ha is impressively ghastly as the employer: a whirlwind of performative neediness"

"But, despite all this, we lose the play’s political punch."

"... the jeopardy that fuels the ending never quite bites and any rage at real-life exploitation feels curiously muted. In the end, perhaps appropriately, the show seems somehow to consume itself."

"What unfolds is a tightly wound, high-decibel psychodrama, full of raised voices and rapid-fire emotion."

"Rosanna Vize’s hyper-realised set and costumes do much to anchor the production."

"The production is, without doubt, a feast of bells and whistles – technically immaculate, visually audacious, and conceptually dense – but that polish sometimes comes at the expense of intimacy."

"Performances are suitably adept. Saban and Wilson hurl themselves into the roles with frenzied commitment"

"The piece becomes a reflection on how social media turns status into performance, friendship into currency and self-worth into statistics."

"Where Dorian Gray succeeded, this Maids sometimes falters. The former had a sense of narrative propulsion... The Maids, by contrast, is static and cyclical"

"... The Maids feels like an experiment admired more than loved: a lavish, looping dream."

"Jean Genet’s absurdist shocker gets a glib update for the TikTok era"

"Australian director Kip Williams radically reimagines the 1947 satire – to limited effect"

"Its titular skivvies serve a twentysomething billionaire mistress who puffs pineapple vapes, drapes herself in haute couture finery and cossets a labubu. While these delulu women inhabit a plausible contemporary setting, however, there's something infuriatingly glib and apolitical about this update."

"... the everpresent projections of smartphone displays don't do much to enhance this story. Williams has adapted this play himself, and he's simultaneously overwritten its 2020s references while underthinking the story's connections to modern influencer culture."

"Williams is deliberately distancing us from their world here, signalling that this is a strange private ritual, not a bravura performance. But when the curtain does get pulled back, things don't get much more persuasive."

"Frustratingly, there's no real sense of class anger here, thanks to the decision to cast three young, conventionally attractive women... Instead, it feels like spending one hour and forty minutes eavesdropping on private conversations that are so trivial you wish you hadn't bothered."

"Genet’s classic The Maids is reduced to Snapchat and screeching"

"Kip Williams’s screen-fuelled staging of the French playwright’s psychodrama is borderline unwatchable"

"... alas: even a crack cast that includes Lydia Wilson can’t prevent this souped-up take on the self-delusions of Instagram culture from feeling as though you’ve descended into TikTok’s seventh circle of hell."

"Genet’s melodrama embraces excess. Correspondingly, so does Williams’s production."

"On one level, the play is well suited to the Williams treatment. Its hall-of-mirrors structure"

"There is a difference between interrogating these ideas and merely embracing them. Williams’s faintly misogynistic production may playfully gesture towards a nightmarish, narcissistic online future in which women are eaten alive by their own trout pouts, but it fundamentally resembles a mirror of itself – a two-dimensional onslaught of eye-rolling vacuity."

"Williams leaves his excellent cast no space to mine the play’s weird tonal shifts, its darker psychosexual pathologies and the crucial influence of Catholic ritual."

"Absolutely unwatchable 'I felt like I was being assaulted in my seat'"

"The Donmar Warehouse's update of Jean Genet's 1947 psychodrama about murderous maids is one of the worst nights I've ever spent in the theatre."

"For 100 interminable minutes that felt far, far longer, three actors on stage screamed at each other, at full speed, non-stop, barely taking a breath. It's exhausting."

"And let me be clear. All three actresses on stage do a Titanic job remembering and wrangling the ridiculously machine gun torrent of text and the ever-shifting, always manic and never profound, moods and tones."

"Yes, there are interesting themes about our addiction to social media, our addiction to unreality... All of this has been done so much more insightfully and intelligently elsewhere."

"Williams' adapted text loses all of Genet's glitteringly dark examination of power dynamics and the menace of imminent murder. It has nothing new or interesting to say"