Olshansky, D. A. Choking Look. About Ksenia Mitrophanova’s Play ‘Maids’ (on the 100th Anniversary of Lii Papen)

Abstract: The ‘Maids’ story has many layers: legal, patographic, dramatic. The criminal story about Papen’s sisters became the material not only for a number of journalistic investigation and social debates Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Eluard participated in, but also provided the basis for the most popular Jean Genet’s play and Jacques Lacan’s book about paranoia (1933). Psychic, social, sexual roots of the crime, murderer as an esthetic event and spectacular pleasure, paranoia leading to the collapse of the subjectivity and delirium as an attempt to cure, - the ‘Maids’ story is made up of numerous discourses and points of views the director just ought to take into account. Nothing to say about the fact that the ‘Maids’ have been staged so many times (even by Peter Bengtson in his opera) that it is almost impossible to show this story in a new light.

Keywords: