Love, hate, murder, & rubber gloves: in a word, theatre.

It is a well-known, oft-quoted cliché that actors like doing baddies, that the roles are somehow meatier. This may be so - I haven't really been cast as one before, although I have done my fair share of unhappily-married middle-aged women (oppressed and not). They have been great roles too. I confess, however, to having had a bit of a hankering for trying my hand, as it were, at someone really mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Well, careful what you wish for, missus. I am Solange in Jean Genet's The Maids. I'll attempt to give a quick synopsis of the storyline: two middle-aged sisters, Solange and Claire, are housemaids to a young and beautiful Madame. Their love for each other is twisted and peculiar in a number of ways, and apart from it, the only content of their lives is Madame, they love and envy her with all the unspent passion of womanhood. They spend their time acting out a fantasy of turning against Madame, of humiliating and ultimately killing her, taking turns at being Madame, the other sister then playing the one "cast" as Madame. (Confused? You won't be, if you come and see it. Or perhaps you still will be.) Arguably, Genet has written the maids as the protagonists, but they - particularly Solange - are scary and murderous. I am not quite off-book yet, so might miss one or two, but offhand I can recall four incidents of Solange either attempting to strangle someone onstage, or speaking of attempting it, or claiming to have finally done it, in the hour-long play. Genet's play is based on a true story (I have linked to a related site in a previous post, but please don't read if you are easily or even medium-easily upset by violence) although it is only a foundation he's built upon, something that has rattled his intelligence in possibly the way the true story Equus is based on did to Shaeffer. I wish, in some ways, that I hadn't read up on the background case .

A couple of my good friends have spoken about the horror of doing a "bad" character - one did the Scottish Laird in the well-known Shakespeare play that carries his name, the other the incestuous Stepfather in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (in which I, incidentally, was the oppressed unhappy elderly crippled wife). I haven't understood why they've felt it so heavy, not really (I mean, the roles are brilliant, so why not enjoy?), but I'm getting an inkling of it now. I am only a self-taught actor so won't pretend to know all the names of Stanislavskian techniques etc, but I go into the process of creating a character with the idea that all of us carry everything inside of us, every human possibility and emotion, and that "all" you need to do is to just tap into it. Which is scary when you start to feel you've a half-developed Solange inside you, that it could be you, under some circumstances -

And yet Solange is sad. Sad beyond belief. And at yesterday's rehearsal I suddenly felt that she was really doing this, she was going to murder Madame not only because she couldn't bear the oppression - in particular of her sister - anymore, but also because she couldn't allow her sister to commit the murder herself. She was - is - doing it out of love.

So - the box in the picture contains some rehearsal props and some actual bits of costume. Visible are e.g. the alarm clock that will warn the sisters, mid-strangulation, of Madame's return, the teapot for the poisoned tea, and Solange's rubber gloves.