Kip Williams disappeared into the wardrobe.
The face of the Australian director, the auteur of theatrical sensations like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Dracula,” suddenly loomed large across the 13-foot-high mirrored cupboard fronts, flanked by the two actresses who had been using a phone to film themselves in its interior moments earlier.
They were rehearsing a vital, phantasmagorical sequence from Williams’s production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids,” and when Williams re-emerged from the wardrobe, the actress Lydia Wilson tried the scene again. “Eternity of me! Eternity of me! Eternity of me!” she cried out ecstatically, as a kaleidoscope of pink lights streamed behind her projected image on the wardrobe.
The passage comes toward the end of “The Maids,” which began performances on May 17 at St. Ann’s Warehouse after a run last year at London’s Donmar Warehouse. It encapsulates a central preoccupation in Williams’s version of Genet’s 1947 drama, which centers on two sisters, Claire (Wilson) and Solange (Phia Saban), who enact daily rituals of power and submission as they fantasize about killing their wealthy employer, Madame (Yerin Ha).
“The phone is taking us further and further away from ourselves, from who we are and the challenge of expressing that in the world,” Williams, 39, said in an interview before the rehearsal last week. “A world that gives you every opportunity not to be yourself.”
In this “Maids,” which Williams has rewritten in a contemporary idiom while hewing closely to Genet’s plot — and the spirit of its often-stylized language — the sisters serve a 20-something, vacuous billionaire influencer, whom they hate and adore. Claire and Solange want to kill Madame, but they also want to be Madame. As they enact changing roles of employer and servant, powerful and powerless, they film themselves trying on new faces and identities in Madame’s flower-filled, cream-carpeted, designer-clothes-packed bedroom. (“An idea of capitalist femininity,” Williams said of Rosanna Vize’s set design.)
The cupboard scene, Williams said, was “a Narnia reference, but I also thought about the terrifying boat ride in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ and the offer of a child having every sweet they could want.” For these women, he added, the fantasy is “a world in which you can have everything you want.”
Williams added that the camera might have been regarded as a truth-telling device in the past. “Now it’s a way of changing our reality, providing a kind of mask, an extension of consciousness.”
Human beings, he added, “have always had to perform a public self, but what this technology that we have now is doing is enabling us to do that performance in a context that is predisposed to curation and a false version of who we are. And that creates a rupture in the collective creative soul.”
Williams, who ran the Sydney Theater Company from 2016-24, is well-known for his use of live video onstage, notably in the hit “Dorian Gray”— in which Sarah Snook played 26 roles — and, more recently, in “Dracula,” featuring Cynthia Erivo performing almost as many characters.
In those works, camera operators and crew members were visible; the artifice of filming the performance is declared. But in “The Maids,” Williams’s use of technology is a seamless merger of form and function. The screens here are the screens we know intimately; our phones, which the sisters and Madame use constantly in projections of image-making fantasy, distorted filters, augmented reality and lurid colors.
“I’m aware that people tend to lump my use of technology in the theater into one thing, but for me it is always very specific to the story,” Williams said. “This was a new way to use it. Every moment of video work is the character choosing to film themselves, and that generated a style that was super playful. A lot came out of rehearsal, finding moments for the characters to film themselves, always motivated by their psychology.”
The filming adds an extra layer of complexity to performance, Wilson said. “The characters are so loquacious, and the language is so dense that manipulating the phone while speaking and moving around was really a rub-your-head-and-pat-your-stomach thing at first.”
She offered an example of one moment in the play. “I have to double tap to change the direction of the camera; select flash on; then change the filter from ugly face to angel face; then hold and slide to the left, which takes it to filming mode, then turn it around to film me and Phia, all while talking.” It’s interesting, she added, “to see what actually flies off that, because you are so in the moment.”
Williams said that he had long been interested in the play, and on rereading it two years ago, he was struck by its prophetic nature. “The play has always spoken to performance and identity, but now our performances are heightened, and we are voyeurs to the lives of the rich and famous,” he said. “Instagram and TikTok have taken what magazines did with celebrity to a whole new level.”
“The Maids,” he added, was an opportunity to reflect a “contemporary conundrum: wanting to become the thing you also want to destroy. We see these widespread social and political movements wanting to overturn power and privilege, and then we are also completely obsessed with the Met Gala.”
The play, he said, “deploys technology very deliberately to demonstrate the dangers of being seduced into that particular paradigm.”
The sisters, Saban said, “are obsessed with seeing everything through the phone; their power is choosing how to see themselves or the other person.” And in performance, she added, “you are aware of the push and pull with the audience between screens and stage, intimacy and alienation.”
For the role of Madame, Ha looked at influencers and celebrity profiles online, and listened to podcasts featuring celebrities talking about their lives. But her recent high-profile turn in the most recent season of Bridgerton — and her 1.7 million followers on Instagram (a mere shadow of Madame’s 28.4 million) — had, she said, given her a deeper insight into her character.
“I understand her fear of abandonment more, why she feels she needs to perform, the curation of self,” Ha said. “I also understand the sisters more; the love-hate relationship between you and the people you idolize and are also jealous of. Every idea of Madame has sunk into my body more with the experiences I have had in real life.”
Williams’s last few productions have been rethinkings of classic works, all drawing him, he said, through “a shared tension between the desire to self-actualize, to manifest the desire within you, and the moral consequences of pursuing that actualization. That issue is now at the center of contemporary life because of the technology we are enmeshed in.”
He added that he was often criticized for his use of screens and technology onstage. “There is a generalized moral panic about this,” he said. “But we have to hold a mirror up to nature.”
