Theatre that freely borrows from contemporary cinema is rare. But director Kip Williams is an innovator. His riveting adaptation of Swedish iconoclast August Strindberg's controversial 1888 one-act play Miss Julie feels ultra-modern — with giant screens and multiple cameras, plus soundtrack. Devotees of Lars von Trier and Lana del Rey's subversively tragic heroines should go.
In Sweden, Midsummer's Eve is about abandonment — with limits. Compellingly portrayed by Robin McLeavy (television's Hell On Wheels), Miss Julie, a capricious young aristocrat alone in a manor, revels with the servants. She singles out her father's cosmopolitan and aspirational valet, Jean (Mark Leonard Winter), in the kitchen. He's supposedly engaged to the cook, Kristin (Zahra Newman). Julie and Jean flirt, spar, drink, shag and spar some more. Both desperately seek escape. However, on realising the potential societal scandal of her saturnalia (aka slut-shaming), Julie freaks.
Strindberg's play is an exemplar of dramatic naturalism. Yet it's now viewed with ambivalence, Strindberg deemed rampantly misogynist. In fact, though influenced by Darwin's theories of survival, Miss Julie explores topical issues of class, gender, privilege, inequality and intersectionality. The real dilemma for Williams is that Miss Julie depicts female victimhood when today's feminism emphasises empowerment and transcendence. As such, his new ending will polarise. It does diminish the shockingly savage impact of Strindberg's original. Nonetheless, it also allows for Miss Julie's all-round redemption.
