LAS CRIADAS, by Jean Genet

Argentinian Pablo Messiez has transformed himself into a Spanish theatre sensation.

- ROSANA TORRES, EL PAÍS (20/11/2011)

The Festival de Otoño en primavera presents this world premiere of Las Criadas, a new version of Jean Genet's Les Bonnes (The Maids) by young director Pablo Messiez, one of the latest, acclaimed generation of Argentinian writers and directors who, along with names such as Daniel Veronese and Claudio Tolcachir, typify a new type of theatre, stripped of effects and driven by its hard-working actors. Messiez sets about updating Genet's disturbing narrative, inspired by the terrible 1933 tale of the Papin sisters who, as maidservants, brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in an agonising cry for survival. He reinterprets this symbolic work to talk instead of the anger felt by those who have to submit to the power exercised with impunity by people above them.

The maids, Solange and Clara, plan the murder of their employer, the Madame. In a kind of rehearsal for the actual crime, they perform the action with one of them playing the despotic employer and the other, her servant. They end up being alienated by the sheer force of this fictitious act and, as happens in the theatre, it acquires a power similar to that of reality, revealing it as another possibility amongst many others.

In Messiez's own words: "A re-reading of the work in the present context is particularly worrying. Every day, we see how the economic crisis reaches into everything and ends up being the justification for any kind of behaviour. It seems that once the crisis has been established as a norm, the "Madames" of this world will see that as a green light to legitimise their abuses".

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