{"id":29518,"date":"2026-05-16T19:39:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T19:39:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/?p=29518"},"modified":"2026-05-16T19:39:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T19:39:21","slug":"a-production-of-the-maids-for-the-internet-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/?p=29518","title":{"rendered":"A Production of \u2018The Maids\u2019 for the Internet Era"},"content":{"rendered":"


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This Maids<\/em> is the latest in a succession of West End productions to transfer to New York without losing its headlining cast members along the way. Ha\u2014who previously worked with Williams in 2019, on a production of Lord of the Flies<\/em> in Sydney\u2014was excited to return to the play. \u201cComing back into the rehearsal room, I felt like I was ready, but also hoping to expand and dive deeper into what we had already explored. That\u2019s a real gift, because it doesn\u2019t come often.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lot had happened since her first go at the play. On January 29, eight weeks to the day after The Maids<\/em> closed at Donmar Warehouse, Netflix dropped part one of Bridgerton<\/em>\u2019s fourth season, which starred Ha as Sophie Baek<\/a>, opposite Luke Hall\u2019s Benedict Bridgerton. By then, Ha had already been anointed the series\u2019 new leading lady, and by the end of premiere day, her first major interviews with the American press had gone live. A few weeks later, she was named the 2026 Ambassador of the Actor Awards, formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Marc Brenner<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Bridgerton<\/em> wasn\u2019t Ha\u2019s first role in a series, but it was her first brush with international stardom. \u201cI feel like the way I understand Madame now comes through a new lens,\u201d she tells Vogue<\/em>. That serves the work well: \u201cIt is a very modern take,\u201d Ha explains, examining \u201cmaterialism, and this obsession with youth and beauty, and the role that it plays in our society.\u201d Williams\u2019s staging is rife with knowing references to follower counts, seemingly every designer label in operation today, the promise of securing a major magazine cover\u2014all familiar proxies of wealth and status. (\u201cIt was a bit of a revelation,\u201d Wilson says of encountering Williams\u2019s adaptation of Genet\u2019s script. \u201cI read it in a coffee shop the day he sent it. I was just laughing out loud like, Oh, my God, the audacity to turn it this modern and to give it such a spin.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cDiving deeper into those themes and how that resonates with me today, versus how it resonated with me a year ago\u2014that has shifted as well,\u201d Ha says.<\/p>\n

The text embraces those themes with a lurid, absurdist sense of humor that spares no one. \u201cThat\u2019s the wild thing about acting,\u201d says Saban, who will be known to some as Halaena Targaryen on HBO\u2019s House of the Dragon.<\/em> \u201cIf you\u2019re lucky enough to do something that has enough attention to qualify for press, there\u2019s this strange dissonance between presenting the appealing side of yourself, but then hopefully, in your work, getting to explore being horrific.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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This Maids is the latest in a succession of West End productions to transfer to New York without losing its headlining cast members along the way. Ha\u2014who previously worked with Williams in 2019, on a production of Lord of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29519,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fashion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hunthow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}