‘To the bitter end’

Jean Genet’s Power and Play

Loosely inspired by a true-crime headline from the 1930s and first performed at Paris’s Théâtre de l’Athénée in 1947, Jean Genet’s The Maids is an electrifying exploration of freedom and constraint, illusion and reality. Two women, locked in an absurd game they’re determined to see through “to the bitter end”, confront the helplessness not only of their social position, but of the human condition.

Join Associate Professor Leslie Barnes, Dr Gemma King and Dr Russell Smith from ANU’s School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics in a conversation and Q&A on power, poetry, perseverance and the centrality of the outcast in Genet’s work.

This is a free event, but reservations are essential. Please RSVP with name and telephone number via rsvp@thestreet.org.au

Leslie Barnes
Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor in French at the Australian National University. She is the author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (Nebraska, 2014) and Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh, 2025) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (Rutgers, 2021). She is also the founder and convenor of the Asie du Sud Est Research Network, a group of international scholars working on textual representations of French Indochina, the contemporary nation-states of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and their diasporas.

Russell Smith
Dr Russell Smith is a lecturer in Modern Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published widely on the work of Samuel Beckett, as well as on various topics in modernist literature, contemporary literature and visual art, and literary theory. His current project examines the impact of James Joyce’s 1930s radio listening on the composition of Finnegans Wake and its treatment of the emerging global wireless communications network.

Gemma King
Dr Gemma King is a Senior Lecturer in French at the ANU and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow leading the project "Sign on Screen" about the representation of sign language and deafness in film and television. She is the author of two books, Decentring France: Multilingualism and Power in Contemporary French Cinema and Jacques Audiard. In May 2026, Sign on Screen will culminate in a free sign language film festival for the deaf and hearing public at the National Film and Sound Archive.