Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
✭✭✭✭✩
by Patrick Marber, directed by David Ferry
Red One Theatre Collective, Storefront Theatre, Toronto
November 13-30, 2013
Julie to John: “Class is your religion”
Red One Theatre Collective is currently presenting a thrilling production of After Miss Julie. Because it opened while I was away, I managed to catch it only just now in its final week. If you haven’t seen it yet, try to do so. The show has proved such a success that Red One has added a matinee on November 30 to help accommodate the multitudes lining up to see it.
After Miss Julie is Patrick Marber’s 2003 adaption of August Strindberg’s 1888 classic Miss Julie. Marber has moved the setting from a midsummer’s eve party in late 19th-century Sweden to a British country house in July 1945 during a celebration of the Labour Party’s landslide victory. Other than updating the language and adding references to World War II, Marber has changed remarkably little of Strindberg’s dialogic structure, but he has altered Strindberg’s focus. What has made Strindberg’s play such a central work in western drama is its melding of gender conflict and class conflict into the single explosive relationship between the aristocratic Julie and her father’s valet Jean. The role-playing involved in both gender and class evolves into general role-playing for dominance between the two.
While the sexual tension between Julie and Jean (here called John) is high, Marber focusses almost exclusively on the conflict of class rather than gender. Despite this, Marber’s great achievement is to create an adaptation that makes us see Julie more clearly as a tragic figure rather than as merely an unstable neurotic. Marber does this by portraying John not as a victim of Julie’s lust but as a man who takes advantage of the chance to sate his cross-class desire when Julie throws herself at him.
Marber also enhances the role of Kristin, the cook (here called Christine), who thinks of herself as John’s fiancée. In productions of Strindberg’s play, as in the recent one by Apuka Theatre this year, Kristin’s belief is portrayed as a fantasy that Jean keeps alive while he casts about for a better prospect. Marber, however, makes it clear that John’s attention to Christine is not feigned. They hug and kiss affectionately and it is only Julie’s intervention that momentarily roils their plans.
Marber’s Christine is much tougher than Strindberg’s Kristin. Rather than listening in silence to Julie’s fantasy of their future life together as a threesome, Marber’s Christine has a full-out argument with Julie, repudiates any claim Julie has on John and, in the only plot twist Marber has added, takes the money that Julie has stolen to finance her escape with John. This deed means that Christine now has a hold over John that Strindberg’s Kristin never had over Jean. She has the means to insure that John is dismissed as she wishes. This will thus further her plan to have them leave Julie’s father’s estate and move to Leeds, where John can get a job with a pension and they can start a family. Marber thus directly counters Julie’s aristocratic fantasy of adventure and romantic love with Christine’s working class ambition for stability and family.
In most productions of Miss Julie, tension exists only between Jean and Julie. Here director David Ferry has succeeded in maintaining an ever-increasing tension among all three characters, especially after Christine discovers John in bed with Julie. This three-way tension gives the play a volatility that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Simply through such a detail as having Christine light her cigarette before she lights Julie’s, Ferry ratchets up the fraught atmosphere between them.
Claire Armstrong’s performance as Julie is quite simply magnificent. When Julie first descends into the kitchen while the party above is in full swing, Armstrong shows us a young woman struggling to maintain a façade of dignity while fully aware that she is crumbling inside. Her commands to John as mistress to servant, including the famous command to kiss her shoe, are clearly play-acting while others are vain attempts to re-establish her identity as superior.
Following Marber’s political spin on the material, Julie no longer believes she is superior. The privileges of class and the aristocracy have become illusions after the chaos of war. Marber emphasizes Strindberg’s point that Julie is the last of her family’s line. The type of person Julie is no longer has a place in the post-war world. Although Marber retains Julie’s tale of her gender confusion due to her mother’s feminist experiments, what is more important is Julie’s class confusion. Armstrong shows that Julie is clearly happier in the kitchen with the servants than in the ballroom with the aristocrats. What Armstrong shows so chillingly is Julie’s gradually realization that she has no identity beneath her façade. By the end when she asks John to command her to kill herself, Armstrong shows that Julie is already spiritually dead. Never have I seen an actor capture so well the myriad internal conflicts of this, one of the most complex female characters in drama.
Marber may have made his John a less complicated character than Strindberg’s Jean, but Christopher Morris gives an ideal portrayal of Marber’s interpretation. Unlike Strindberg’s Jean, Marber’s John is not as caught up in the fantasy of bettering his lot. He drinks wine with his meal to be classy but downs it as if it were beer. He may speak some French, but we sense he would exhaust his knowledge after just a few phrases. Rather Marber makes John’s airs simply a reflection of the master he serves. His bedding Julie is simply opportunistic since the physically desirable woman makes herself so available to him and the notion of violating class boundaries turns him on. Yet, to John, sleeping with Julie is no different from sleeping with a prostitute as he shows by casting coins at her. In an important moment Morris’s facial expression changes completely when Julie tells him she has no money. Any momentary dream that sex with Julie might have engendered immediately collapses and he returns to polishing his master’s shoes, a servant at heart and content enough to return, albeit with some resentment, to the reality of the normal life that Julie disrupted.
Amy Keating gives a powerful performance as Christine. Marber and Ferry give her long periods of time alone on stage where purely through the physical action of doing her daily duties Keating reveals Christine’s state of mind. Work and routine give her purpose and Christine resents any interference with them. For someone like Julie, who does not work and is unpredictable, Christine has no respect except that due to a social superior. In her first long period alone when John is dancing with Julie at the ball, Keating shows how anxiety gradually creeps into Christine’s actions the longer the dance goes on, until she has to give up hope of ever having the next dance with John and finally falls asleep from exhaustion. Her second long period alone is when she wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers bit by bit what has happened between John and Julie, her curiosity finally changing to revulsion. Unlike any previous Kristin, Keating’s Christine has the pride and anger to stand up to Julie and expose Julie’s fantasies for what they are. Keating shows that Christine’s taking the master’s money is a sign of her triumph. It is Christine’s insurance that the future will be what she decides it will be.
With such an electrifying performance from Armstrong as Julie, such powerful performances from Morris and Keating and such immaculate direction from Ferry, it’s no wonder that this production has garnered so much praise and support. Try to see it if you can and hope that Red One will remount it in the near future.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Christopher Morris as John and Claire Armstrong as Julie. ©2013 Jonas Widdifield.
For tickets, visit www.redonetheatre.com.
2013-11-27
After Miss Julie