a bit of bonhomie

I’ve never seen or read Miss Julie, by August Strindberg, before. Having been surprised and impressed by his paintings in an exhibition a few years ago, however, I have a sense of how far ahead of his time Strindberg was, how close he was to the edge of sanity and/or genius, and so I was very curious to see whether this 120-year-old play was still relevant and compelling to modern audiences.

The answer, with a few reservations, is a definite yes. Most especially, the dramatic chemistry between the suave, proud and cultured valet, Jean (Declan Conlon), and the reckless “wild child” daughter of the estate, Miss Julie (Catherine Walker), is something I won’t forget in a hurry. In this version by Frank McGuinness, the dynamics between them, as performed by these two subtle and well-matched players, are sexualized in a very contemporary way. The power struggle is not predictable, however; there is a volatile edgy switching of control and status between them, a sophisticated sex play bordering on sadomasochism, that is at times blatant and scintillating, and sometimes disturbing and poignant. And yet, the two never stray too far away from the emotional reality: Miss Julie’s life is ruined; she is the author of her own downfall, and as she careers desperately from envisioning one possible future to another, with or without the support of the ambiguous (and sometimes cruel) Jean, it becomes obvious that she is losing her mind.

So electric, modern, and accessible is the relationship between these two, that it enables us to see clearly the values and cultural norms of the era, and the differences between then and now become strikingly clear. In particular, the characters lack a certain psychological insight into their situation, which is not surprising, considering Freud had not yet begun publishing his work at the time. And yet Strindberg, with his references to hypnotism in the play, was champing at the bit to understand consciousness, and what we would understand now to be neurosis. He raises all sorts of questions about receptiveness to mind control, free will, identity and consent. He also writes of the fear that feminism posed to the social order, and, in one reading of the play it could be argued that Miss Julie’s sorry plight is a cautionary tale against feminism. Her end may be less shocking (and therefore less dramatically satisfying) than Hedda Gabler’s was to prove to be, a few years later, but it is nonetheless an intriguing one.

For the characters in Miss Julie, the class system underpins their sense of identity as rigidly as skeletons hold flesh together. The experience of Miss Julie’s fall from societal grace is akin to breaking one’s neck; it’s not something from which she can ever properly recover, unless she steals money and leaves everything she knows and starts a new life elsewhere, or kills herself.

We do not have such stark choices, such moral absolutes, in the twenty-first century, and so, at one level, this play has “dated”. And so, I would have preferred the third element of the love triangle, Juan’s “intended”, Kristin, the working-class cook, to be a little less the caricature of the prim, stiff-backed, overworked conservative servant, and whether that is in the writing or in the performance I saw in preview, by Mary Murray, I am not so sure. McGuinness actually has her say the punchline to the classic Barker/Cleese/Corbett sketch on the class system, “I know my place”, and as it is delivered humourlessly in this production, I wonder if something has gone a little awry.

I am also curious why Landmark Productions would need a “once-off” Arts Council grant to produce this show, seeing as it is essentially a three-hander. The nice set by Joe Vanek is functional and intelligent, but it doesn’t really add much to the production – the carousing extras who come on for one short scene are lively and well choreographed, but as they are probably acting students doing it for “experience”, (ie peanuts), it would hardly break the bank to have them on. Why would a play such as this require public funding? It is well directed by Michael Barker-Caven, and is a sexy and thought-provoking, slightly uneven but nonetheless intelligent production of a classic. That’s good enough for me.