On our descent down the stairs, the scent of food being prepared and cooked was strong. Entering the theatre, we are greeted with a working kitchen in the middle of the large open space. Some audience members have already arrived, seated at restaurant tables, being attended to by actors from the ensemble.
It’s a thrilling moment,
a rush of verisimilitude and an assault to the senses. Things are loud, as you
might expect in a restaurant kitchen, orders shouted and affirmations of “Yes
Chef” dotted around. It’s immersive theatre by way of The Bear. We’re in
a Greek Restaurant. It’s Greek Easter. A modern-day rendition of August Strindberg’s
Miss Julie is about to commence or it already has.
“Miss Julie
is crazy again tonight, absolutely crazy” is the first line of dialogue in
Strindberg’s play, but by the time we get to it, Julie (or Ioulia) has run
around the restaurant and demanded some Britney Spears over the loud speakers.
It’s a memorable start, dropping the audience into the world of the play and
setting the scene with carefully choreographed chaos.
In the preface
to his 1888 play, Strindberg writes a manifesto to naturalism in the theatre, a
movement that is in its infancy at that time. He writes several plays in this
style. One of the other great proponents of the genre was Russian playwright,
Anton Chekhov. A new adaptation/response/reworking of his play, The Cherry
Orchard, opens tomorrow night at the Malthouse. Company 16’s production of Miss
Julie cleaves toward naturalism at the beginning, but quickly moves away
from it as the show progresses.
The play is
a three-hander. Miss Julie is the daughter of the boss; in the original, a Count
who owns an estate and here, he’s the owner of a restaurant named after his daughter.
John and Kristina are employees of Julie’s father. They are engaged, but one evening,
Julie sets her sights on John and she starts to flirt with him. As the night
progresses, Julie and John get closer, playing mind games (and physical games) together
while Kristina sleeps.
The next
day, as Julie’s father approaches, all three characters must deal with the
fallout of the previous night. The “tragedy in one act” in its original form is
about modernity versus tradition and the power and privilege of the young woman
versus the servile manservant who is cowed by the sight of his boss’ boots.
Strindberg actually describes the conflict between Julie and John (Jean per
Strindberg) as a battle of “life and death”. It’s Darwinism on display.
Julie is
written as strong-willed but confused. She’s aware of her standing, but knows
as a woman she will rely on men for much of her life. She was raised to “think
and act like a man” – translated in 2025 to a quip about her mother raising her
without gender expectations.
It’s both an
interesting update as well as feeding into the problematic nature of the
original. By the end of Strindberg’s play, Julie feels trapped by how she was
raised – a product of her mother and father and not yet herself. Is this production
saying being raised with a liberal openness to gender leads to the same
confusion and inability to know who she really is?
Equally, the
reference to Julie being “crazy” in the original is because she has danced that
night with both the gamekeeper and John. Here it’s noted that she dances with
men and women and we’re presented with an insidious allusion to the depraved bisexual
trope.
In his
notes, director and adaptor, Harry Haynes, speaks of being haunted by the play
since he first encountered it at rather-young 14-years-old. When a text hits
you like that so young, it’s no wonder it turns over and over in your mind.
In 2016,
Melbourne Theatre Company staged a production of Miss Julie written and
directed by Kip Williams. His production remained roughly in the period it was
written, but enhanced by on-stage cameras – a technique he’d reach an
apotheosis with in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Williams once
said the play “made me angry”. So angry, he found a way to comment on the
original by splicing in more modern feminist commentary. A sort of “see how far
we’ve come” while indulging a little in the social mores of the 1880s.
Other recent
adaptations have added more politically-charged dynamics to the relationship. Playwright
Amy Ng complicated things with imperial exploitation by setting her version in
Hong Kong in 1948. Yael Farber’s Mies Julie drops the story into
apartheid South Africa.
The premise
is so simple that it feels wide open for interpretation and interrogation. But
at the centre lies a problem which is tricky to navigate: the portrayal of
Julie as a manipulative brat is problematic, but siding with John, who is cheating
on Kristina, his fiancée, is equally fraught.
Transferring
the conflict to modern-day Melbourne and making Julie a flirtatious, troubled 18-year-old
(Strindberg’s Julie is 25) centres John as a predator. Sleeping with the boss’
daughter shouldn’t really be a problem in this day and age, if there are no
other questionable power dynamics. But we’re told that John has been obsessed
with Julie since she was a child, ostensibly because he was envious of her
life. Now it reads as troubling; either he’s always been obsessed or he’s lying
to lower her guard.
The
naturalism of the opening scene gives way to a more stylised piece as Haynes’
production continues. The stainless-steel benches roll away. The ensemble of
hospo workers become an unsettling chorus of dancers and heavy-breathers, after
first lending some raucous cheering from outside the venue at knock-off. Strindberg
keeps the house staff off-stage, suggesting that the three characters on stage
might be caught at any moment. In this version, their purpose is harder to pinpoint.
Once it
becomes a battle between Julie and John, the continually-mounting tension
threatens to derail any connection to human emotion as it tips closer to
melodrama. Arguably, with a moment of animal violence late in the play, it drops
over the edge. The heightened nature of the closing moments struck many of the
audience as funny.
Of the
three characters on stage, Izabella Yena’s Kristina comes off as the most
sympathetic. She’s the one who has been cheated on and watching her slowly put
the pieces together of what has happened between Julie and John is tense and
heartbreaking.
She also
gets to be the real modern-day adult and call John out on his taking advantage
of an ostensible child, but it’s not enough to forgive the production its
original sin of trying to update the play to today. Yena’s performance is
magnetic.
Adam-Jon
Fiorentino’s John is wonderful early on, as his chemistry with Yena is superb
and you can buy them as a couple in love and negotiating the pressure of
working together for a boss who frightens them. His physical presence is
intimidating when he flies into a rage or towers over Annalise Gelagotis’
Julie, but both of them pitch toward a frenzy that becomes difficult to watch
as the show wears on.
In the
middle of the cavernous Fortyfive Downstairs, watching the play effectively in
the round, the dialogue becomes muddy in their mouths and when they
projected/shouted, it echoed and reverberated around the space. In moments it
was visceral, but then it was tiring. After a while, the arguments
become circular, looping around the idea John has of running away to Corfu. Will
they or won’t they run away. By this point, I was so frustrated by their
indecision, I found it difficult to care.
Angelina
Daniels’ set design is impressive, but because the kitchen is cast aside pretty
quickly, it feels a bit like a gimmick. Georgie Wolfe’s lighting is lovely,
though, doing a lot of heavy lifting to create interesting playing spaces once
the set is effectively struck.
Bringing Miss
Julie into the 2020s underlines the problems with the misogyny of
Strindberg’s original, rather than making any particularly interesting
commentary on the work. See how far we haven’t come? It’s hard to look past a
show that suggests Julie has manipulated John and he’s easily led. Kristina warns
the younger woman off crying rape, when it seems like Julie might use that to
absolve herself of what happened that night. And it’s all wrapped in a family-trauma
bow that is supposed to explain everything away, but that comes so late it’s
hard for us to absorb that information into the character arc or the narrative.
I
understand why theatre-makers are drawn to older works that might benefit from
a fresh eye. There is something potent in these characters and their conflicts.
But it’s notable that most of the other adaptations I’ve seen or read about were
still period pieces – a tacit acknowledgement that the politics of sex and
power have changed and the drama we create around it need not rely on these
very dated tropes.
Miss
Julie is playing at
Fortyfive Downstairs until August 17
Photos: Matto
Lucas
Comments