‘The Maids’ Starring Cate Blanchett, Isabelle Huppert

As showpieces go, they don’t get much showier than Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert in the Sydney Theater Company production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, the theatrical centerpiece of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival. Genet based this 1947 play on a notorious murder case in which two homicidal sisters killed their mistress and her daughter. The kind of roles, in other words, that actresses would kill to play. Blanchett and Huppert are demonstrably well equipped to play the parts — but not on the same stage. The mismatching of these super-thesps is quite baffling. The fluid nature of Genet’s absurdist theatrical style opens the play to any number of interpretations, including the provocative notion that play-acting and murder are both legitimate ways of establishing one’s own identity. Set designer Alice Babidge acknowledges as much with a box set constructed of glass, with multiple mirrors and an overhead video screen. If life is a stage, then this is a stage where artifice comes to life. Inventing an identity invariably means stealing from other people. This is the context in which Solange (Huppert) and Claire (Blanchett) are introduced to us. As personal maids to the mistress of the house, the sisters share a tiny room in the attic. But with their mistress out of the house they feel free to creep into her flower-bedecked bedroom and appropriate pieces of her identity. By lying on her bed, trying on items from her vast wardrobe — color coordinated and gorgeously arrayed on a stage-length garment rack — and making free use of her makeup, they enact a highly ritualized scenario that ends, menacingly enough, with her murder.