
When the Lady is not at home, Solange and Claire put on a role-reversal play. They dress in her clothes, put on her lipstick, wear her pearls, wear her favorite perfumes, celebrating the apotheosis of the satanic and decadent world.
The life of “servants” and “maids”, sometimes literally as household helpers, and sometimes metonymically as the alter ego of their masters, is a thematic material that is especially familiar and recognizable in European drama. From Moliere Sganarello, the servant of Don Juan, to Goldon’s “Servant of Two Masters” and from the comedy “Salad” by D. Koromilas to “Angela” by G. Sevastikoglu, a number of dramatic characters have been written, with whom the Greek audience came into contact at different periods of Russian theatrical history. Sometimes he reflected on social problems concerning class differences, and sometimes he amused himself with the “suffering” of comic types and improvised figures of commedia dell’arte.
However, in the case of Jean Genet’s Slaves, everything is different and extremely complicated. Genet composes an extensive one-act play (“Bonnes”, 1947), in which the first word is spoken by disguise and role-playing, personality change and mirages of illusions. It is inspired by a particularly heinous crime committed in 1933 at Le Mans by the Papin sisters, maids at the Lancelin household, and murderers of the mother and daughter of the family. Genet, as a true playwright of the theater of the absurd, presents his dramatic images on stage without pretense of realism. This leaves them open to their dreams, their nightmarish fantasies, their obsessions, so that they follow a completely subjective perception of real life. At the Apothecia Theatre, Giorgos Skevas realized the Pirantine technique of these illusions between stage and reality in terms of direction, scenography and costumes. He has responded to the many challenges Slaves presents to the director, actor and audience. The work involves an initiation into a kind of rite in which “servants” are identified with their masters and become rulers only at the level of fantasy.
In 1933, at Le Mans, the Papin sisters killed the mother and daughter of the Lancelin family.
He constantly staged a religious ritual where the “Servant” committed the death of her Mistress. He dressed Solange as a nun and acted out the action in a city room that resembled both a graveyard and an art gallery, with a copy of Belgian Romantic painter Antoine Wirtz’s The Novel Reader as a huge backdrop covering the entire space. main view of the scene. Flower beds, a bed-grave, a mirror-mirror of gestures of a twin woman make up the stage atmosphere, now creepy, now absurd. The architecture of speech is represented by the excellent translation of Dimitris Dimitriadis, especially effective in expressing the allegorical and metonymic meanings of Genet’s colloquial language.
Alexandra Sakellaropoulou portrayed the narcissistic, domineering and controlling figure of the Lady, who gives away her etol fur and offers a red dress from her wardrobe from this “sacred crypt of the Virgin”. In an ironic and formalistic manner, she conveyed the dramatic tension and climaxes that arise between her and her “slaves”. She, with the confidence of her acting abilities, portrayed the kind, beautiful, sweet and rich Mother of God, expressing in relation to them the appearance of generosity and generosity. Angelica Papatemeli and Amalia Cavali as Solange and Claire go through the entire interpretative scale of passive, submissive and dependent existence, and reach vocal and physical paroxysms dictated by the deprivation of erotic pleasure, self-abasement and, finally, mutual annihilation. . The two actors brilliantly play the “slave girls” who see in the face of their mistress an oppressive and domineering figure. Violence against her frees them, provides a way out of their miserable life. Slaves are “guilty when the Mistress is innocent”, and they are innocent when the Mistress is Guilty. In fact, killing the Lady sets them free. They are poor, mentally abused, and believe they will remain slaves for the rest of their lives. Claire drinks the poisoned iced tea and the “acting” Lady dies.
Ms. Rhea Grigoriou holds a PhD in History and Drama from AUTH and Professor of Greek Culture at EAP.
Source: Kathimerini

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