After Miss Julie
The Sunday Age
Sunday April 29, 2007
After Miss Julie. To May 19. Red Stitch Actors Theatre, rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda. Tel: 9533 8083. $30/$20.
3.5/5Patrick Marber's play is a version of the August Strindberg classic, reset in post-war England. It dramatises the same tensions between the intelligent and attractive servant, John (Daniel Frederiksen), and the disturbed daughter of the lord of the manor, Miss Julie (Sarah Sutherland). The latter, not averse to a bit of rough, sets about the seduction of the former, despite the intermittent presence of John's fiancee, Christine (Olivia Connolly), and the proximity at a dance of the other estate servants, who like nothing better than a juicy scandal. Like Strindberg, Marber is interested in the way class interacts with sexual attraction; another kind of power, but one that owes nothing to social position.This is a striking, deliberate production that builds its atmosphere slowly with pauses and absences (at one point the stage is empty) as much as with action. Sutherland's Julie veers from little-girl coquetry to shrill hysteria, torn between ingrained consciousness of her birth and urgent desire. Frederiksen's John moves between teasing, testing the edges of his "place", and angrily demanding equality. Both reflect the broader society that voted in a Labour government in the 1945 election. Connolly's Christine is chilling in her religious and social certainties. A tense, dangerous production. -- Bill Perrett
© 2007 The Sunday Age