DIRECTOR’S NOTE
The Premiere of Les Bonnes at the End of 2024
Les Bonnes (The Maids), first published in 1947, is one of the early major works of the French writer Jean Genet. The play is often associated with the notorious Papin sisters case: in 1933, two domestic servants brutally murdered their employer and her daughter, provoking a major public outcry. In this play, Genet constructs something more dangerous and more ambiguous than the crime itself. He sets this three-character play in a bedroom filled with secrets, creating for the two “servants” a dangerous, obsessive “ritual of role-playing” built upon layers of lies.
In a preface to Les Bonnes, Sartre wrote: “Truth leads to the lie and vice-versa.” I began rehearsals for the production that premiered at the end of 2024 with this sentence in mind. We felt as though we were conducting an investigation. Why do Claire and Solange play at being Madame every night? What are they rebelling against? What are they imitating? Who do they want to become? Have they committed murder? Does Madame even exist? Every gesture, every line could be a lie, or a truth concealed beneath a lie. I approached the play as a deliberately constructed labyrinth of illusions, full of danger.
Les Bonnes premiered at Hui Theatre in December 2024. Among the responses I heard from colleagues in the theatre were: “This is such a difficult production,” “It’s exhausting,” and “The actors have an incredibly hard job.” To be frank, although this version marked an important step forward, I believed there was still a great deal of energy waiting to be released. Even then, I had a sense that the Les Bonnes I imagined would not be ‘finished’ after a single run. Perhaps it was destined to remain an open work, resistant to conclusions and stability, demanding to be taken apart and reconstructed again and again.
Revisiting Les Bonnes in Early 2025
Since the premiere, journalists and audience members have often asked: “Why is Madame played by a man?” “Could the maids also be played by men?” “What role does gender reversal play in this production?” These are legitimate questions, and they deserve serious consideration. Genet himself expressed the wish that Les Bonnes be performed by three men in women’s roles (although the 1947 premiere at the Théâtre de l’Athénée in Paris, directed by Louis Jouvet, featured three actresses). But perhaps the reversal of gender is only the surface of the question. What matters more is the theatrical illusion that reversal creates. Cross-gender casting here is not simply a novelty or a comic device; it is a deliberate displacement onstage. This displacement brings to mind the distancing effect in Brecht’s theatre: rather than allowing spectators to surrender entirely to the illusion of conventional realism, it invites them to look beyond appearances in search of a deeper reality.
After the first round of rehearsals, I became more convinced that Les Bonnes should focus not on the performers’ gender but on the relationships between the characters. Power, fantasy and self-identity intersect and pull against one another, forming a fragile, tightly stretched web of relationships. Claire and Solange are far more than simply sisters. How do they imitate one another? How do they cling to each other even as they resist? How do they become the ‘other’ in their fantasies? They seem to me like projections of one another, each an ‘other self’: dependent yet rejecting, imitating yet wanting to destroy the other. There is repression, longing, jealousy, adoration, resentment and a love that cannot be spoken.
After the New Year, in early 2025, we began another period of rehearsals. This work went deeper than the rehearsals before the 2024 premiere, but it was also more unstable. It was not a revival. We were opening the text again, creating the work anew. I came to see ever more clearly that Genet’s theatre does not seek to reproduce reality but to create illusion. His Les Bonnes is neither a work of social realism nor a psychological analysis, nor is it a staging of a real crime. For me, Genet’s theatre is the ultimate place of illusion. We did not need to pursue ‘believable’ characters. Instead, amid uncertainty, repetition and fluctuation, we sought a kind of ‘performance within performance’. The actors’ task was not to ‘make it look real’, but to generate distortion, displacement and ritual: to summon, in that bedroom made of illusions, an energy more real than reality itself.
Even after the first run, the actors kept saying: “Why are we doing all this?” “The more we work on it, the less I understand the play.” “I can’t convince myself to become this character.” These doubts, resistances and anxieties became precious material in the creative process. I did not try to avoid them. I tried instead to bring these seemingly ‘unrehearsable’ feelings into rehearsal. Nor did I rush to help the actors find answers. I let ‘not understanding’ become part of the performance. Not understanding does not mean giving up on understanding; it means refusing a single interpretation. What we rehearsed again and again was not a result, but exposure and unease. We practised learning to walk through cracks, to produce ‘failure’ while remaining on our feet.
I did not want ‘refusing to arrive at a shared understanding’ to be just a publicity slogan or a fine phrase for a media interview. I wanted to make ‘not understanding’ itself a starting point for performance. What the actors presented onstage was no longer ‘relationships already established’ or ‘questions already thought through’, but the process of searching for them. Every gesture, every conflict, was directed not towards ‘explaining’, but towards ‘trying to understand’.
To my mind, a work like Les Bonnes does not call for a psychological or realist approach. What it asks for is not ‘explanation’, but ‘exposure’. The ritual the maids perform each night is not meant to reproduce reality, but to let illusion and desire escape through the ritual itself. This is a performance in a state of ‘ongoing rehearsal’: unstable, unfinished, yet full of energy. Through repeated friction with actors I know well, this ‘performance within performance’ gradually became a working method I wanted to pursue. It demands genuine agency from the actors: a willingness to step into the unknown, to try things, explore and take risks.
Rehearsals, and even performances, became a continuous process of dismantling and rebuilding. What we establish today may have to be abandoned tomorrow; a path we find today may no longer work the next day. In several productions in recent years, actor friends have sometimes complained that even after a premiere, I still come to them with new ideas and requests just before a performance. But I want to lead them towards facing a fact: performance has no fixed ‘result’. It is fleeting. It exists only in time, recorded in the present through the continual acts of rehearsing, watching, listening and revising. This creative process demands enormous trust, and asks the actors to bring their vulnerability and sincerity into the performance.
Plans for a National Tour in the Second Half of 2025
In the second half of 2025, we decided to embark on a national tour of Les Bonnes. This time, in both the stage imagery and the actors’ performances, we must sharpen the production’s theatrical language further, heightening its sense of distance, displacement and the tension between characters.
Some new actors will join this touring version. Before settling on the cast, I invited them to spend an afternoon talking with me about Les Bonnes. Some had seen the previous two versions. They asked me a question: “Director, what do you most want to express through Les Bonnes?” I thought for a moment, then drew a huge question mark in the air.
Les Bonnes is a work described as a ‘classic’. But we should always remind ourselves: a classic is not a ‘settled conclusion’, but an ‘open question’. It offers no answers and draws no conclusions. It presents a complex field of relationships that keeps us asking questions. And theatre is the space in which those questions are generated. Les Bonnes may be an allegory of social hierarchy, a fantasy of psychological projection, or a ritual in which power, gender and destruction intertwine. The audience does not come to watch a narrative system that has already been fully explained; it is invited into a dangerous, unfinished space charged with tension.
For me, the national touring version of Les Bonnes is not simply an act of ‘reproduction’, but a creative journey in which the work is continually made anew. Each performance is an opportunity to encounter and create with audiences in a new space. Every time the stage is rebuilt, the work is reconstructed. The architecture of each theatre profoundly affects the texture of the performance and the relationships between the characters. Space reshapes the actors’ rhythms, movements, lines of sight and flows of energy. The audience’s position, perspective and responses, in turn, become part of the work.
On this journey, I hope the touring Les Bonnes will become a ‘travelling ritual’, moving between theatres in different cities. Everyone who enters is there not only to understand, but to become a participant in the ritual: to feel together, to be shaken together.
Come with the two maids into Madame’s room.
Be careful. Do not be too quick to believe what you see.
Here, truth is only a mirage. The ritual has already begun.
Sifan Shao
15 August 2025