Culture | Theatre If you’re going to stage a faithful version of August Strindberg’s 1888 drama it needs to be acted with heartfelt conviction, and this one isn’t. In Max Harrison’s production for Lidless Theatre , aristocrat Julie (Katie Eldred) and her servant Jean (Freddie Wise) seem to be going through the motions of a prearranged game, rather than engaged in a life or death struggle across the class divide. I didn’t believe for a second in their passion, their hatred or their despair.
The two piercing screams Julie emits – deafening in this small theatre – emphasise the emotional emptiness. A study of the shifting power balance between two people trapped by convention and undone by sex, Miss Julie is perennially popular, but there’s a reason why contemporary film and theatre artists tend to update it. The naturalism and sexual frankness that Strindberg pioneered can look hackneyed and quaint today, the language overemphatic.
As with his near-contemporary and fellow-Scandinavian Henrik Ibsen , there’s no middle ground. The plays can be sublime or thuddingly awful. Harrison uses a 1965 translation by Michael Meyer, whose decorous and literal approach went out of fashion in the Nineties.
Jean speaks to his fiancée Christine (Adeline Waby) of a “hullabaloo” over Miss Julie breaking her engagement and celebrating by dancing with the servants on Midsummer Eve. He perves over her shape: “What shoulders and..
. et cetera.” When she enters the kitchen w.
