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written and directed by Yaël Farber

Baxter Theatre Centre at the University of Cape Town, Enwave Theatre, Toronto

May 6-10, 2014

“Unmissable”

Mies Julie is the third version of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) that Toronto has seen in less than a year.  In August last year we had Lady Julie that kept the original Swedish setting of Strindberg’s play.  Then in November came Patrick Marber’s British adaptation After Miss Julie from 2003 that moved the setting to Britain in 1945.  Now in her 2012 adaptation, South African playwright Yaël Farber has moved the setting to Freedom Day (April 27) in 2014 in a farmhouse in the Karoo in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. 

What could a 19th-century Swedish play have to say today about post-apartheid South Africa?  Quite a lot, as it turn out.  Just as Marber’s adaptation reflected British preoccupations with class barriers, repressed emotions and mental game-playing, Farber’s reflects a conundrum that has vexed southern Africa when Europeans of different nations claimed it for their own – the question of who owns the land and what constitutes ownership.  Farber sees in the struggle between John, a male black servant, and Julie, the white master’s daughter, a tragic struggle for both possession and for self-possession.

Mies Julie is the most savagely visceral of the three versions because Farber shows how close humans are to animals in their territoriality and their drive for sex.  To emphasize the question of ownership, Farber introduces a fourth character to the three of Strindberg’s play.  This is Ukhokho, a “Xhosa woman, other-worldly ancestor of indeterminate age”, who circumambulates the blood-red tiles of the playing area while striking an inkinge (a bow with a tin resonator).  Patrick Curtis’s set is a stylized kitchen, a wall-less space with dinette table and chairs, a bench where John polishes boots, a stand filled with boots and, unlike other version of Miss Julie, a tree stump out of metal wire. 

As we learn, Julie’s ancestors built this kitchen directly over the burial ground of John’s ancestors.  The majestic tree that used to shade them was cut down to make room for the house.  Christine (Zoleka Helesi), whom Farber has made John’s mother, not his fiancée, is periodically overcome with the injustice done to her ancestors.  Her work of scrubbing the floor is not a meaningless activity but is her means of communing with their spirits.  Occasionally, Christine even sees a spirit in the form of Ukhokho, who sits on the tree stump and stares.  Even when not on stage Ukhokho, played by musician and singer Tandiwe Nofirst Lungisa, sits downstage right and regards the action.  At the end of the play she again circumambulates the kitchen playing an uhadi (a more ancient instrument than the inkinge, a bow with a calabash resonator), as if the ritual blood-letting to bring about “the restitutions of blood and soil” (as per the subtitle of Farber’s play*) had taken place.

In Farber’s play, Julie (Hilda Cronje) is strictly off limits.  The notion of Jean’s psychologically manipulating her does not exist.  Despite his single denial, Farber’s John actually does love Julie and is the only person who ever has.  We learn that Julie’s mother came back from the hospital with the baby Julie, gave her to Christine to bring up and never once looked back.  In Farber’s version it is Julie who does all the sexual enticing, deliberately working up John to intercourse.  For Farber, Julie’s “madness” does not derive from her mother’s feminist ideas as in Strindberg, but, more naturally, from having been brought up by Christine with John as a childhood playmate, who, after he reaches puberty, is forbidden company for her.  It is not her contrary ideas that drove Julie’s mother to suicide as in Strindberg, but living in isolation in the semi-desert of the Karoo with an abusive husband.

Just as the set is stylized so is Farber’s direction.  The play is almost as much a physical theatre piece as it is spoken theatre.  Accompanied by music by Daniel and Matthew Pencer played live by Brydon Bolton and Mark Fransman, Mantsai and Cronje’s interactions are choreographed in the manner of highly acrobatic modern dance.  An initial sequence of attraction and repulsion, with John’s repulsing of Julie growing weaker each time, culminates in intercourse after which their actions reverse that first sequence moving from closeness to stronger and stronger repulsion. 

Cronje and Manstai give amazingly intense, physically exhausting performances.  One senses the erotic tension between them from Julie’s first entrance and that tension only grows in power until it explodes first in sex, then in violence.  The two show us their internal struggles even when they don’t speak, Mantsai in particular trying to fight down the temptation Julie so brazenly offers.  At the same time both make clear that their “love” of the other is a sign of self-hatred.  Both are all too aware of what Julie’s Afrikaner ancestors have done to John’s for one night of passion to wipe it out.  Meanwhile, Helesi’s Christine is an exceptionally strong presence.  The look she gives John and Julie when she sees them lying together expresses more revulsion and rage than words could express.  Yet, Christine has her own contradictions – one side drawn to the traditional veneration of ancestors, the other, Bible in hand, fast in the faith brought to Africa by European missionaries.

Mies Julie is a shattering experience, sometimes so disturbing it is difficult to watch.  Though Farber takes a non-naturalistic approach in staging the play, her text is just as naturalistic as Strindberg’s in depicting her characters as products of heredity and environment.  Farber also portrays the action as tragedy, inevitable from the beginning given the backgrounds of John and Julie, and not merely a tragedy for Julie but for both or them.  Farber’s adaptation renews the power of Strindberg’s original and finds in it a commentary on the convergence of sexual, racial and social politics relevant the world over.  Mies Julie is simply one of the must-see theatre events of the year.

©Christopher Hoile

*The full title of Farber’s play is Mies Julie: Restitutions of Body & Soil Since the Bantu Land Act No. 27 of 1913 & the Immorality Act No. 5 of 1927.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Zoleka Helesi as Christine, Bongile Mantsai as John, Hilda Cronje as Julie and Tandiwe Nofirst Lungisa as Ukjokho, ©2012 Murdo Macleodaii; Bongile Mantsai and Hilda Cronje, ©2014 Rodger Bosch. 

For tickets, visit www.harbourfrontcentre.com.