Classy Dames in Desperate Straits Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert in ‘The Maids’ at City Center
Ben BrantleyAugust 10, 2014: Some real classy dames are tearing up the joint at City Center, where the Sydney Theater Company is performing its rip-roaring production of Jean Genet’s The Maids as part of the Lincoln Center Festival through Aug. 16. You might add that these ladies, embodied in the august personages of Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, are stinking up the place, as well. Their language, with its sewer-mouth talk of body odors and functions, is as rank as it is florid. Then there’s that fancy perfume they keep spritzing on their private parts. And, oh, those cut flowers — what looks like acres of them — which are flung about at random and used as vigorous instruments of flagellation. A less-charitable theatergoer might detect another aroma within this bouquet of smells: the whiff of acting so ripe it’s gone rotten. But to object to that would be to miss the point of what the comfort-zone-trashing director, Benedict Andrews, and his brave cast of three — which is rounded out by the smashing young actress Elizabeth Debicki — are trying to achieve here.
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