The Maids, Donmar Warehouse review – Jean Genet’s absurdist shocker gets a glib update for the TikTok era

Two girls are preening into TikTok filters, lips puffed out like sofas, eyes glittering with menace. Australian director Kip Williams's latest modish take on a classic turns Jean Genet's 1947 absurdist shocker The Maids into a breathless satire on 21st-century female vanity. 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.

This spring, Williams showed us what he's capable of with a tour-de-force reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which splintered Oscar Wilde’s luxuriant visions into a kaleidoscope of screens. He uses similar tactics here, but the ever-present 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.

When we first see the pink-overalled maids Claire (Phia Saban) and Solange (Lydia Wilson) it is through a drape of white gauze. They’re rattling through their lines, roleplaying a scenario where a tyrannical mistress insults her humble employee. 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. Saban and Wilson end up feeling girlish and one-note as they scurry about, playing dress-up and doing some dazzlingly ineffectual cleaning (they’d be fired in seconds in a real oligarch's mansion). As their mistress, Yerin Ha brings some welcome glamour and cruelty to proceedings, but Genet's power plays are missing. There’s no suppressed sexual tension between these women: Williams sanitises the maid’s resentment into boring old envy about who's prettiest, who’s youngest, and who’s got the nicest dresses.

Currently, there are bigger things to get angry about. We’re living in an era when the killing of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has made the super-wealthy sleep somewhat less comfortably in their beds. And it’s a fear that French playwright Jean Genet knew all about: The Maids was inspired by a case of two servants who murdered their boss, and it captured all the moneyed classes’ collective terror of the unknowable servants who wiped away their mess.

Frustratingly, there’s no real sense of class anger here, thanks to the decision to cast three young, conventionally attractive women who've been directed to speak in petulant tones, suggestive of upbringings where someone else did the cleaning. Instead, it feels like spending one hour and 40 minutes eavesdropping on private conversations that are so trivial you wish you hadn't bothered. Like a smartphone filter, it creates a pretty picture – but seeing the uglier realities underneath would have been more interesting.

At the Donmar Warehouse until 29 November