Reviews 2002
Reviews 2002
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by August Strindberg, directed by Herbert Olschok
Soulpepper, Premiere Dance Theatre, Toronto
August 27-September 21, 2002
"Soulpepper Can't Master 'Miss Julie'"
Soulpepper's current production of "Miss Julie" is a major disappointment. The play is one of the seminal works of modern drama. Stratford has not done it since 1977 and the Shaw Festival never. Therefore, it is good that Soulpepper has chosen it as their first foray into Strindberg. Unfortunately, two of the three main actors are not up to the demands of their characters and a burden of directorial quirks make an evening that ought to be gripping merely tedious.
The 90 minutes of the play follow events that occur during the celebration of Midsummer's Eve on an estate in Sweden. Jean, the Count's valet, and his fiancée the cook Kristin are already a bit randy in the spirit of the celebration. So is the absent Count's only child Julie, who has just broken off her engagement. To console herself, to celebrate, to fulfill her sexual desires, to abase herself, she begins to flirt with Jean much to Kristin's dismay. This escalates to a sexual encounter after which the two gradually awake from their delirium. Julie is filled with both longing for escape and self-loathing that, hastened by the sudden return of the Count, culminate in tragedy.
In "Miss Julie" Strindberg created what is perhaps the most perfect and certainly the best-known Naturalistic tragedy. Under the influence of Darwin, he wrenches the force of Fate away from the influence of gods or the stars to find it in the formative influence of characters' heredity and environment. Miss Julie, brought up both as a woman and a man, finds the two sides of her nature constantly at war with each other. Jean, born a servant but aspiring to raise himself above his station, finds his dreams undermined by his lackey's personality. The two may feel a sexual attraction, but Strindberg makes clear that Jean and Julie are also playing out psychological games of power and domination. One can hardly see O'Neill "Long Day's Journey into Night", Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Pinter's "The Homecoming", among others, to recognize how much 20th-century playwrights owe to Strindberg, who revealed the psychological complexity and mythic struggle inherent everyday life.
How sad, then, that Soulpepper could not find two actors able to communicate the complexity or struggle within these two characters. Julie is the most significant role Patricia Fagan has yet been assigned, and while she has been excellent in smaller roles, it's clear that this recent theatre school graduate is not yet ready to carry a show. Her line delivery is very flat except when she shouts to show emotion. Julie is so riddled with internal strife that this tension and its multiple subtexts should be suggested in every line she has. Instead what we get is a spoiled young rich girl who dallies with a servant giving us little clue of the despair and self-hatred we should see in her from the beginning.
Tony Nardi fares better as Jean than he did recently as Leontes in "The Winter's Tale" but the same problems remain. His rapid-fire, deadpan delivery that works so well in comedy is totally out of place in tragedy. As with Fagan, subtlety and nuance go missing when that is exactly what should make this interplay of man and woman, servant and master, riveting. Instead of communicating any intensity, Nardi's Jean seems to act out of boredom.
The best performance of the evening comes from Jane Spidell as Kristin. In her hands this character, often regarded as only a foil for Julie, becomes as complex as Jean. Spidell fully brings out the tension in Kristin between longing for a happy married life and knowing the pain she will suffer with Jean as her husband. Spidell never loses focus and suggests a realm of unspoken thoughts and feelings behind everything she says. Only when she is on stage do we see the kind of electricity the whole show should have.
Spidell is also the only one in the cast who is able to invest some of Herbert Olschok's bizarre stage directions with meaning. Olschok, who directed Soulpepper's disastrous "La Ronde" last year, is determined to make this famous Naturalistic play as unnaturalistic as possible by demanding stylized action on stage to underscore, unnecessarily, the play's themes. Kristin pours out a bottle of sand in an arc on the floor which become the line between master and servant Julie should not cross. Periodically the actors walk in slow motion. Is that because Strindberg says they are sleepwalking through life?
Julie first appears in riding gear, then after dancing with Jean, in a dress to illustrate her male/female nature. And when Julie and Jean exit to have sex, the kitchen set reacts, chairs overturning, cupboard doors flying open, drawers shooting out as if this were "Blithe Spirit", to demonstrate, too obviously, how the order of things has been upset. And saxophonist Colleen Allen, who functioned as the psychopomp in "La Ronde" appears again here, I assume, for the same reason, dropping portentous baby booties along the way. Why Kristin pours beer at a great height into the washbasin and no one who uses it thereafter notices I haven't figured out yet. Are their lives so polluted they don't notice?
Indeed, Olschok seems far more interested in choreographing the action and devising stage tricks than in getting Fagan or Nardi to explore the text. Olschok has all three characters begin in such a pitch of sexual fervour that they have nowhere to go. To have Jean and Kristin already going at it before Julie enters undermine the play's structure. Strindberg has carefully constructed the play to built gradually to two climaxes involving Julie, the first ending in sex, the second in death.
Peter Hartwell has designed a very handsome set reflecting the clean, spare lines and bright colours of Scandinavian country furniture. His costumes are nicely poised between period and modern, making Kristin, as suits this interpretation, appear conservative but not frumpy. Too bad he couldn't find Nardi the right sized bowler. Louise Guinand, normally noted for her subtle lighting, has little chance to display it. Here where stage time equals real time one might suppose the light would gradually grow as dawn breaks. But Olschok has asked for the lights to be clinically bright throughout except when they suddenly dim at each climax.
Soulpepper's "Miss Julie" an unsatisfactory production of a great play. Since Stratford and the Shaw seem to be avoiding Strindberg, I do hope Soulpepper continues to explore his plays, preferably, however, with directors and casts who can meet the challenge.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Patricia Fagan and Toni Nardi. ©2002 Cylla von Tiedemann.
2002-09-05
Miss Julie