The Chambermaids

"The Chambermaids" by Jean Genet, performed for the first time in Paris in 1947 amid violent protests, mercilessly exposes the perversion of a conservative and retrograde society, questioning morality as a privilege of the rich and powerful. In a style both playful and incisive, the French author's play explores the boundaries between love and hate in a structurally unjust world. Jean Genet is a playwright and poet who "broke frontiers", constantly questioning the idea of ​​freedom, both in his work and in his private life. Himself an orphan, a deserter, a thief and a vagabond, love and his fascination has always been directed towards the fate of those who live on the periphery or outside of society.

Jean Genet requested that the three characters in his play, Solange, Claire and Madame, be played by men. Such a decision does not surprise us much nowadays, but challenges us to analyse the problems of representation and stereotypes specific to contemporaneity, with the aim of finding new forms of authenticity and generating new empathic connections.
Actors Yannick Becker, Benedikt Häfner and Daniel Bucher from the German Section of the "Radu Stanca" National Theatre of Sibiu, as well as young actress Ana Tiepeac in the role of Jean Genet himself, face these challenges together with the "RakLap" orchestra, which provides the musical accompaniment, to stage a manifesto against the power structures depicted in the play and against today's injustices.

In Hunor Horváth's staging, the actors must constantly fight for the identity of the characters, while their masquerade is reflected in the water that covers the entire stage, and the clearly divided roles at the beginning begin to blur on the revolving stage. Likewise, the scenography created by Elöd Golicza will capture the actors’ craft and radiate it in all directions like a prism.

It all boils down to one big question: who and what can we be in a world that assigns us a role even before we are born? Or: does it take a disaster that affects us all to understand that we are all one entity and that we share one world?