Reviews 2013
Reviews 2013
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by August Strindberg, adapted by Natalie Feheregyhazi, directed by Rod Ceballos
Apuka Theatre, Campbell House Museum, Toronto
August 30-September 14, 2013
Julie to Jean about her father: “Pretend that you're him, and that I'm you”
The strange Strindbergophobia that has gripped Ontario theatre may finally have been broken. Apuka Theatre is staging Strindberg’s best-known play Lady Julie (better known as Miss Julie) in the kitchen of the Campbell House Museum, the ideal naturalist setting for one of the prime examples of naturalist drama. Strindberg intended the play written in 1888 for an intimate space, and you could hardly get more intimate than an historic kitchen that can hold only 30 spectators, most only a few feet away from the actors. Rod Ceballos has directed the classic play with admirable clarity and if the actors don’t capture all of nuances of their characters, it is because Strindberg has given them such a complex range of nuances to capture.
Ontario theatre has curiously ignored Strindberg in unadulterated form over the last ten years. In 2009 Canadian Stage presented Stephen Sachs’s adaptation of Miss Julie called Miss Julie: Freedom Summer that shifted the action to the 1960s American South with a white Julie lusting after an African-American John. In 2008 KICK Theatre presented Tara Beagan’s adaptation Miss Julie: Sheh’mah that shifted the action to 1920s BC with a white Julie lusting after a First Nations Jonny. Other than these adaptations to other times and places, Tarragon Theatre last presented a play by Strindberg (The Father) in 1990. Soulpepper last did so in 2002 with Miss Julie. Stratford last did so in 1977 also with Miss Julie. The Shaw Festival last staged Strindberg in 1987 with Playing with Fire, the only Strindberg it has ever mounted despite its mission to present Shaw and his contemporaries.
This is odd treatment for one of the founders of modern drama, both naturalist and expressionist, and an acknowledged influence on such artists as Edward Albee, Ingmar Bergman, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. In the last ten years London, however, has seen two major revivals of The Dance of Death and one of A Dream Play, not to mentions more Miss Julies.
Natalie Feheregyhazi’s adaptation for Apuka Theatre leaves the time and place in Strindberg’s original late 19th-century Sweden and confines itself mostly to avoiding the archaisms of older translations. The original Swedish title is Fröken Julie, where Fröken, like Fräulein in German, does mean “Miss” but has more the sense of a title than the English “Miss” does now. To call the title character “Lady” Julie does make clear that Julie is an aristocrat but does not make clear that she is unmarried. As it happens, the new title suits Rod Ceballos’ interpretation since he places the greatest emphasis in the Julie-Jean relationship on their difference in social class.
Of the three actors, Alexander Crowther comes closest to conveying the multiple contradictions roiling within his character. At first these contradictions are comic. Jean sets the boots of his master, the Count, on the kitchen table, and talks with his mouth full about how cultured he is. His ordinary behaviour undermines his aspirations to the higher station he thinks he deserves. Crowther preserves Jean’s ambiguity about Julie to the end. He gives us the impression that Jean himself is not certain whether he loves Julie, is awed by her rank or is merely using her. He seems both devastated and relieved by Julie’s fate as his own dreams collapse at the bell signalling the Count has returned. It is an intense yet sensitive portrayal of a would-be Machiavel who succeeds only because the object of his manipulation is so weak but who ultimately fails because he is so weak himself.
Julie is with Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler one of the most complex female characters in drama. She simultaneously loves and loathes her own sex, the opposite sex, her class and conventional social mores. Aggression and passivity vie for dominance in her personality. Natalie Feheregyhazi portrays Julie as a highly insecure, unstable young woman whose attempts at dominance appear as a façade to hide her inner confusion. This portrayal is generally effective but Feheregyhazi tends to depict Julie’s moods sequentially rather than simultaneously. We need to see more clearly that internal combat informs Julie’s every action.
Heidi Lynch underplays her role as Kristin, the pious, unambitious kitchen maid who serves as a foil to both Jean and Julie. Lynch is intent on keeping Kristin quite and purposeful, but she should allow us more of a glimpse beneath her placid demeanour of what Kristin thinks of the bad behaviour of her supposed fiancé and her mistress.
Even if the cast does not convey all the complexities it could, Rod Ceballos’ incisive direction ensures that this is one of the best traditional versions of Strindberg’s play to be staged in Toronto in a very long time. While so many directors focus only on the sexual power plays of Julie and Jean, Ceballos brings out the political aspects of the play by showing how the clash of personal desires is exacerbated by class distinctions. Although the play is naturalistic, Ceballos also makes us aware of Strindberg’s dissection of human relations as role-playing and of society as a kind of theatre. He allows Strindberg’s revolutionary “pantomimes” where Kristin goes about her work without dialogue, to take a leisurely course, so that we come to feel we are voyeurs peering into characters’ private lives.
Natalie Feheregyhazi, founder of Apuka Theatre and herself a survivor of domestic violence has pledged that 100% of the producers’ profits from this production of Lady Julie will go to Ernestine’s Women’s Shelter, an organization that provides options and hope for those looking to free themselves from violent patterns and situations. Strindberg was well-known as a misogynist, but Feheregyhazi thus reclaims his work to benefit women and serve as a starting point for discussions of domestic violence and its origins.
Let’s hope that this production helps break the peculiar absence of Strindberg on Ontario stages since it reveals both Strindberg’s genius as well as his depiction of disturbing aspects of psychology, society and human relations that in more than a century have still lost none of their relevance.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: (top) Alexander Crowther and Natalie Feheregyhazi; (middle) Heidi Lynch in the Campbell House kitchen. ©2013 Apuka Theatre.
For tickets, visit www.campbellhousemuseum.ca.
2013-09-01
Lady Julie