Mademoiselle Julie

Juliet Binoche makes her third irresistible, scintillating appearance on the London stage in this immensely stylish and well-modulated production of Strindberg’s great one-act play from the Avignon Festival, playing a languorous aristocrat swept up in a midsummer madness of drink, dance and sexual adventurism.

The setting is modern – one of the first songs we hear at the party is Blondie’s “Hanging on the telephone” – but the French text (with surtitles) is completely faithful to the original, or at least very similar to the Michael Meyer translation.

But the action – which is stretched out to last for two absorbing hours – is removed from the single-set large kitchen to a big white area that is a poetic space containing a forest of silver birches, the outline of a country house pavilion and a conservatory of sliding glass panels.
 
Laurent P Berger‘s design and lighting is a fluctuating mood chamber, with areas picked out for emphasis. The incursion (marked a “ballet”) of the peasantry in Strindberg is altered to a permanent outdoors party where Binoche’s Julie is first seen smooching in a glittering golden haute couture dress with two dozen of her father’s staff (dancers cast here in London).

And, as Julie, Binoche combines those elements of translucent grace and raw physical sensuality we saw her display, respectively, in Pirandello’s  Naked at the Almeida and with Akram Khan in In-I at the National; she’s tremendous, especially at transforming her social status into a teasing, sexual sadism.

She literally shudders from top to toe while commanding Nicolas Bouchaud’s servant Jean, sucked into her vortex of voluptuousness, to kiss her shoe. He of course, this being a French production, does so for an unconscionably long time, zut alors!

Thereafter, the swings and roundabouts of their relationship are set with precise emotional choreography around the dawn stillness of their post-coital tristesse in the forest. Those shocking outbursts are no less shocking, or powerful, than they must have been in 1888: valets are valets and whores are whores, they scream, and when the little bird’s head’s chopped off, you still squirm at Julie’s blood lust speech.

The protagonists are both much older than usual, but this works in the light of their confessions of past experience, and it also makes the beautifully decent and dignified Kristin of Bénédicte Cerutti, the exhausted cook who is Jean’s fiancée, all the more tragically deserted. Jean’s crisis is not that of a fickle country boy, but the life-changing overnight disaster of a vengeful passion in the class war.