Miss Julie
Miss Julie at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket
I’ll have to lay my cards on the table – I’m a closet Christopher Eccleston fan. There’s something about his tremendous nose, rigid idealism, unfailing intensity and his collection of unconventional roles (think Shallow Grave, Cracker, Elizabeth, Our Friends in the North, Jude) that endears him to me. So it was with particular pleasure that I imagined him starring in this play.
Bias aside, the part of Jean, the valet who transgresses convention by having an affair with his master’s daughter, seems custom made for this working class warrior of an actor, and Eccleston makes the most of it with a truly charged performance. Here is a proud, sometimes cruel, man who bucks brutally against the yoke of servitude.
His Jean is matched decibel for decibel by Aisling O’Sullivan as Miss Julie, the object of his ill-placed ardour. Initially haughty and commanding, Julie throws herself at Jean during a steamy Midsummer Night’s revels then falls to mercurial pieces when the power tables are turned following her deflowering.
When Strindberg wrote the play in the 1880s, it took him years to get it staged – and, little surprise, it was denounced by Victorian critics as immoral. Incredibly, the play still has the power to shock. While the class warfare arguments have dated – causing some passages to descend into laughable melodrama – the incomprehension exhibited between the sexes is still startlingly raw and violent in this new version by Frank McGuinness.
What is lacking from Michael Boyd’s production is sexual energy. We get anger galore, but apart from a moment of shoe-kissing, Eccleston and O’Sullivan never quite manage to convey the unquenchable passion for one another which would make proceedings really ignite. The result is more petty schoolyard squabbling than lovers engulfed by fiery lust.
The baccanalian intrusion of an orgy-making mob of servants who realise exactly what their missus is up to compensates to an extent, but it also drives the final act of seduction itself off-stage which, perhaps, is not the best place for it.
There’s solid support from Maxine Peake as Jean’s no-nonsense girlfriend cook who finds solace in the conventions of class and religion. And Tom Piper’s grimy basement kitchen set, with its spiral staircase that ascends to the ruling heavens, does well to underline both the baseness of proceedings and the difference in the characters’ social statuses.
With this latest production, Miss Julie remains a short, sharp shock to the senses, if a tad unsexy. And, with my fan hat back on, it provides a good West End introduction for Eccleston. Here’s hoping he’ll be back soon.
