St. Ann’s Warehouse will conclude its 2025-26 season with the Donmar Warehouse’s celebrated production of The Maids, written and directed by Kip Williams. The production, which resets Jean Genet’s 1947 masterpiece firmly in the social media age, runs from 17 May to 14 June.
Following Williams’ international success with The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Maids explores class, identity, and the dangerous allure of online performance. With their influencer employer away, two maids descend into obsessive role play, acting out their darkest impulses as the line between fantasy and reality dissolves.
The production stars Phia Saban and Olivier Award nominee Lydia Wilson as Solange and Claire, with Bridgerton’s Yerin Ha as Madame. Critics praised their performances, with The Guardian describing them as “storming” and The Standard noting that Ha “blows through the middle of the play like a capricious cyclone”.
Kip Williams said he was drawn to the play because it reflects a world where people “are living a large portion of their lives online, interacting with each other in an unprecedented way in an abstract, virtual space, and expressing and performing ideas of self within the highly curated framework of that space.” He added, “our unparalleled access to the lives of others is creating an exacerbated obsession with lives centred around materialism, youth, and beauty…Jean Genet, in the middle of the 20th century, had a somewhat prophetic view of how a society that was obsessed with materialism might unravel, and, unfortunately, he was correct.”
Featuring video design by Zakk Hein and scenic design by Rosanna Vize, the show uses live broadcast elements as the characters stream their fantasies from Madame’s immaculate boudoir. The result is a heightened world where filtered screens clash with brutal truths.
The production premiered at the Donmar in autumn 2025, receiving rave notices. The Stage hailed it as “a dazzling digital-age headrush” while The Daily Mail called it “wildly extravagant” and “superbly done”.
St. Ann’s Artistic Director Susan Feldman said, “What most attracted me was the outsized scale of the imagery to which these poor girls aspired, available to them (or anyone for that matter) at the touch of their fingertips on their pocket phones 24/7. With a click their deepest hopes burst into fleeting reality with unforgettable size and power, creating false memories and broken dreams one after the other, consuming them with what they could never attain in real life. It’s a modern tragedy pushed to the nth degree.”
Donmar leaders Tim Sheader and Henny Finch added, “Kip Williams’ innovative production of The Maids took audiences in London on a wild ride with its exhilarating script, thrilling technology, and searing social commentary. We are very proud of our longstanding relationship with St. Ann’s Warehouse and are delighted that New York audiences are now going to have the chance to see Yerin Ha, Phia Saban, and Lydia Wilson in this powerful and timely new version of Genet’s classic work.”
Listings and ticket information can be found here
