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Wednesday, July 23, 2025

UTT theatre students take on Genet's Graduating with The Maids

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Sex and vi­o­lence, whether pre­sent­ed vi­su­al­ly, or on the page or stage, al­ways gen­er­ate in­tense re­ac­tions. When you add com­e­dy, phi­los­o­phy, the ab­surd, sur­re­al­ism and the dy­nam­ics of pow­er, (dom­i­na­tion and sub­mis­sion) to the in­tial cou­pling, you've cre­at­ed a lethal­ly ex­plo­sive cock­tail, in this case Jean Genet's dra­ma The Maids. Last per­formed in Trinidad over 30 years ago, The Maids makes a time­ly re­turn when the first co­hort of UTT's The­atre Arts grad­uands present Genet's con­tro­ver­sial and high­ly chal­leng­ing play, for a lim­it­ed week­end run at the Lit­tle Carib The­atre, start­ing Fri­day April 4.

The pro­duc­tion is the fi­nal Se­nior Project Practicum, the penul­ti­mate as­sess­ment (fol­lowed by a One-Man show the­sis in May) at the end of the first The­atre Arts four-year BA course. Pre­vi­ous end of se­mes­ter pro­duc­tions by stu­dents in­clude Willi Chen's Free­dom Road, the Shake­peare com­e­dy As You Like It, Mustapha Matu­ra's Three Sis­ters and the Cuban ab­sur­dist dra­ma Night of the As­sas­sins.

What­ev­er their pre­vi­ous ex­pe­ri­ence, noth­ing can have pre­pared the young ac­tors and stage crew for the de­mands of Genet's script, ju­di­cious­ly cho­sen by Be­lin­da Barnes head of UTT's The­atre Arts de­part­ment and di­rect­ed by Mervyn de Goeas.

Ini­tial­ly there seems lit­tle com­mon ground be­tween a play writ­ten by a white French­man which pre­miered in 1947, and the UTT grad­uands. Clos­er in­spec­tion re­veals themes and is­sues still sear­ing­ly cur­rent in the neo-colo­nial post­mod­ern Caribbean, where sex, vi­o­lence and the ab­surd have been un­easy bed­fel­lows from the time of Colum­bus' com­ing.

Based on a true mur­der case from 1930s France (in which two sis­ters gouged out the eyes and then ham­mered to death their haughty mis­tress and her daugh­ter), The Maids ven­tures in­to a fan­ta­sy world of sa­do-masochism and ho­mo­eroti­cism, a play with­in a play, fired by the ha­tred and self-ha­tred of the op­pressed.

Do­mes­tic slaves, sis­ters Claire and Solange, much like the ex-slaves of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry Jamette car­ni­val, en­act in their sub­ver­sive and trans­gres­sive role play of their re­la­tions with their hate­ful and hat­ed mis­tress, much of the psy­chopathol­gy Franz Fanon chart­ed. The prob­lem­at­ics of dom­i­na­tion and sub­mis­sion (sex­u­al and so­cial in the play, rather than racial), "Oth­er­ness" and iden­ti­ty, ho­mo­eroti­cism and in­cest all sim­mer in the con­tem­po­rary Caribbean psy­che, as much as they do in Genet's script.

As truth (ever a trump for re­al­i­ty) would have it, Genet was more of a so­cial out­cast than his maids. The il­le­git­i­mate son of a pros­ti­tute who aban­doned him, the stri­dent­ly ho­mo­sex­u­al Genet served time for pet­ty theft be­fore mil­i­tary ser­vice in Mo­roc­co, Al­ge­ria and Syr­ia and peri­patet­ic cross-dress­ing pros­ti­tu­tion through the cities of south­ern Eu­rope and his sub­se­quent meta­mor­pho­sis in­to the dar­ling of the French ex­is­ten­tial­ist in­tel­li­gentsia, with his de­but nov­el Our La­dy of the Flow­ers (1943), penned dur­ing an­oth­er prison spell.

Much like his equal­ly in­flam­ma­to­ry play The Blacks, The Maids with its con­vo­lu­tions of fan­ta­sy and its play with­in a play, ques­tions as­sump­tions about what con­sti­tutes dra­ma, which makes it an ide­al ex­er­cise for as­pir­ing ac­tors. Al­though di­rec­tor de Goeas, like many be­fore him has ig­nored Genet's orig­i­nal in­struc­tions that the fe­male roles be played by boys (Kar­i­an Ford, Kem­lon Nero and Aryana Mo­hammed re­tain their gen­der) he ad­mits to be­ing as chal­lenged by the script as his ac­tors; "Genet is con­fus­ing and com­plex...it's like a Chi­nese box puz­zle, so sur­re­al­ist and ab­sur­dist and yet root­ed in re­al­i­ty."

Faced with the prospect of "birthing a whole new gen­er­a­tion of ac­tors" de Goeas is in­trigued by his stu­dents' fu­ture em­ploy­a­bil­i­ty ("No­body wants di­rec­tors or ac­tors, they're a dime a dozen"). Hav­ing sur­vived the wilder­ness of T&T's the­atre­land for more decades than he'd prob­a­bly like to re­mem­ber, de Goeas in­sists the stu­dents be ready for the most me­nial and frus­trat­ing as­pects of life on and off­stage, all part of the process.

Di­rec­to­ri­al­ly, he's fo­cused on get­ting the stu­dent ac­tors to ac­cess and utilise their own life ex­pe­ri­ence, a strat­e­gy they ap­pre­ci­ate, as Kar­i­an Ford says: "It's good to have a di­rec­tor who val­ues your opin­ion, who's in­ter­est­ed in 'what do you have to bring' to the pro­duc­tion." Kar­i­an al­so points out that The Maids brings a new type of dra­ma to the time-worn lo­cal reper­toire of farce and com­e­dy. "There are new ac­tors, new faces and the nov­el ex­pe­ri­ence of ab­sur­dist the­atre."

If Genet's volatile con­coc­tion pre­sent­ed by those who are com­ing to come is in­suf­fi­cient in­duce­ment, then free en­try to this fan­tas­tic psy­chodra­ma must sure­ly be a clinch­er.

Book­ings be­gin to­mor­row at the Lit­tle Carib.


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