Miss Julie

Synopsis

Midsummer's Eve, Sweden, 1888. The Count's daughter and his valet cross social and sexual boundaries; and must face the consequences. While the servants' party continues in the barn outside, aristocratic Miss Julie is drawn to the kitchen and to the socially ambitious Jean, her father's valet. What starts as a harmless flirtation, soon descends into a ferocious power struggle and battle of the sexes, from which neither can escape.

Our Review:

18 July 2006

Miss Julie, first published in Stockholm in 1888, was not exactly welcomed by critics of the day. "A heap of ordure"; "one long protracted foulness" and "a filthy bundle of rags which one hardly wishes to touch, even with tongs", were just some of the more hostile comments.

Strindberg's offence, like Ibsen's before him, was an unapologetic frankness about sex and the adversarial nature of sexual relationships to which playwrights after him are directly indebted. Add to this a scrutiny of the class struggle and you begin to see why he caused such a brouhaha.

But nothing dates faster than the shocking, and Miss Julie is, in truth, at times a bit of a bore. In a preface, Strindberg wrote that he had eliminated intervals and that if audiences could listen to a lecture, sermon or parliamentary debate for 90 minutes, they should be able to "endure" a play. Clearly the playwright had little time for the pleasure principle.

Not tha...

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Latest User Review

86.136.126.47) - 2 July 2006:

This production of Stringberg's intense examination of lust and ambition is blessed by memorable performances from a gifted cast. The dangerous games that are played out between the flirtatious, self-destructive Miss Julie, (played hypnotically by Andrea Riseborough), and Jean, the valet, (a powerful, portrayal from Richard Dormer), have an immediacy that makes the audience feel an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism; the urgency of the relationship that unfolds between these two makes the ultimate tragedy seem inevitable. The tension felt in the audience was certainly palpable. The play's modern resonances ring clear: the anger and the passion and the sexual politics are as relevant today as they were at the time of their first writing. Jean's cold and flippant discarding of Miss Julie after they consumate their brief relationship, is brilliantly done by Dormer,and the audience laugh almost inspite of themselves at his swift disposal of Miss Julie's pet bird. The heightened sense of the brutality of his utter disregard for any life that cannot further his own is an uncomfortable one to watch. Equally so is Miss Julie's increasingly evident mental imbalance, woven into Andrea Riseborough's performance. The anchoring of this world in Ireland lends an interesting pertinance to the resentment Jean feels towards his English employer and grounds his anger and distaste for Miss Julie in a wider political context. A memorable production, well worth catching. ...

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