Each issue of D&T we bring you a teachers’ guide to a play for study with your students, written by a fellow teacher. This issue, Chris Whyld takes a fresh look at an absurdist option for A Level
 
A performance of The Maids at Chris Whyld's online theatre festival, MOATFEST
A performance of The Maids at Chris Whyld's online theatre festival, MOATFEST - STUART THOMAS

One of Edexcel's A Level Drama and Theatre play choices for Component 3 – Theatre Makers in Practice, interpreting one performance text, in the light of one practitioner for a contemporary audience – is Jean Genet's absurdist masterpiece The Maids.

The Maids was inspired by the real-life crime committed by sisters Christine and Léa Papin in 1933. Christine and Léa were servants in a bourgeois home in the small town of Mans. The family were unduly harsh with them and, after a scolding from the mother and daughter, the sisters, overcome by an uncontrollable fit of rage, tore out their eyes and then killed them. They further mutilated the corpses and bathed in the blood.

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