Slow On The Update

"We had a meeting in early 2012 to talk through some initial ideas and, from that point on, we've all been immersed in that world,” Caceres says. “I think the best way to work is intensively, but over a long period of time. That's the kind of approach we've taken. The material is rich and big and Stringberg deserves the best. We've been very careful and devoted to it.”

Of late, adaptations have been increasingly decried among Australian theatre critics as lazy or cheap theatre-making. Nobody will be able to make that accusation of Belvoir Theatre Company's Miss Julie. In adapting August Stringberg's classic text of class and gender politics, director Leticia Caceres, writer Simon Stone and actor Brendan Cowell spent over 18 months figuring out how best to tackle it.

The original work concerns a frustrated nobleman's daughter rebelling against her station through an affair with one of her father's servants. As events unfold, Stringberg investigates the relationship between the working class and the elite and a young woman's negotiating of her sexuality and identity. Stunningly, it was written in 1888 – a time when even the existence of female sexuality was still under debate.

Caceres says of the work: “What's exciting about it is, when we return to the original script, we discover that it's still incredibly relevant. There's still very much that snobbery that exists between classes. There's still that grudge from the lower classes towards the higher. The misogyny in the text is still alive in our society today; we've seen it with the recent dethroning of our prime minister.” It's a project clearly driven by passionate investment. In particular, it's obviously an important work to Caceres. One of Australia's most respected young directors, Caceres' career has been built on political work; both as an independent director and with her company RealTV. When she first discovered Miss Julie as a theatre student, the work's thematic content found an immediate sympathy.

“I've always been drawn to Miss Julie precisely because of what it deals with... I remember studying it as a teenage girl and being completely confronted by it. Our culture has saturated everything with sex in a really horrible, gonzo-porn style, meaningless objectification of women. It's a great time to be doing Miss Julie. I think the way that it stands in its classical form speaks about a particular time in history when we still had an aristocratic notion of class, and that doesn't exist explicitly anymore. So, we had to re-imagine it and illustrate that it still holds. What's frightening is how much it all still holds.”