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written and directed by Stephen Sachs

Canadian Stage Company/Playhouse Theatre Company, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

February 12-March 7, 2009

With Miss Julie: Freedom Summer (2007) by Stephen Sachs, Toronto sees its second failed adaptation of Strindberg’s classic 1888 play in three months.  Just last November Tara Beagan’s version, Miss Julie: Sheh’mah, premiered.  Classic plays do not need wholesale rewriting to remain vital but can take on new resonance simply through casting and design.  At CanStage, think of the Prairie evangelist Tartuffe of 1992 or the gender-reversed Taming of the Shrew in 2000.  A white Miss Julie and a black Jean (here “John”) and Christine, Southern accents and a 1960s décor are all we need to get the point that Sachs has added race and civil rights into the mix.  Sachs’s attempts to shoehorn information about “Freedom Summer,” a voter registration project in 1964 aimed at increasing the black vote, feel forced since the play is fundamentally about sexual politics and mind games.

The cast is top-notch and would be great in a less wayward production.  Under Sachs’s direction Caroline Cave begins her Miss Julie at such a high pitch she has nowhere to go but over the top into a parody of Southern Gothic.  We hear that Julie is taking antidepressants, but her manic behaviour, short attention span, fits of shouting and delusions of grandeur make her seem more like a meth addict.  Strindberg intended Julie to be a sympathetic character and her death as the tragedy of someone whose psyche is at war with itself.  Cave’s Julie is in such an uncontrolled state throughout she is more repellant than sympathetic and makes John’s attraction to her, even if it is only lust, seem barely credible.  Kevin Hanchard captures all the vacillations of John’s emotions, but under Sachs he seems sincerely smitten with Julie, even though Strindberg’s manipulative Jean is playing games with Julie as much as she is with him.  As Christine, John’s fiancée, the stalwart Raven Dauda fares best in Sachs’s adaptation.  She’s given a wider range of emotions and a real longing for John, although a twist Sachs gives her at the end tips the play ruinously into unintentional comedy.                        

                 

Pam Johnson’s stage-filling, fully operational kitchen set is highly detailed but who would choose to have their stove and fridge twenty feet apart?  Like Sachs’s adaptation it is superficially naturalistic but ill-conceived.                                 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-02-16.

Photo: Kevin Hanchard and Caroline Cave. ©David Cooper.