Reviewed by James
Karas
Mies Julie is a
remarkable reworking of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie by Yaël Farber
for South Africa’s Baxter Theatre Centre and it received an outstanding
production at the Athens Festival.
Farber takes the basic plot of Miss
Julie and transfers it to post-apartheid South Africa. He adapts and enriches
the play while keeping the basic plot outline of a rich woman’s relationship
with someone who is racially different and socially inferior.
John (Bongile Mantsai) is a muscular young farm labourer who is almost a
slave on a farm owned by the father of Julie (Hilda Cronjé). The two have a
complex relationship which involves at the very least passionate carnal
attraction and deep-rooted resentment.
The play takes place in a kitchen where John’s mother Christine (Zoleka
Helesi) is the cook. She is dependent on the white farmer for her living but
she is also the only person who showed any affection to Julie while she was a
child. There is a rack of boots in the kitchen and John’s job is to polish them.
The situation is made even more intense and explosive by the issue of
the ownership of the land. The whites own the land and they have deeds to prove
it but where is their moral authority to use the land and to keep the blacks as
their servants? We are reminded several times that the play takes place during
the celebrations of Freedom Day.
This is a richly-textured and highly dramatic plot but Farber who also
directs the production eschews the melodramatic aspects of the story by using the
Brechtian epic theatre method of distancing the audience. He has a saxophonist
and a recorder player on the stage as well a black woman playing a stringed instrument
on stage. The baritone notes of the saxophone and the low foreboding music of
the string instrument are an almost continuing obbligato to the action.
Cronjé as Mies Julie is a restless woman, dressed provocatively, as she
walks around the kitchen, lies languidly on the kitchen table, performs several
pirouettes and engages in a sexually incendiary dance with John. She is a complex
woman, full of passion, aware of her class superiority, knowing that Christine
was the only person who showed her any affection in her childhood and inexorably
drawn to John.
John faces similar conflicts but he is at the other end of the social
scale. She orders him to kiss her foot as she deals with her attraction and
repulsion. He is equally attracted and repulsed by her. The sexual encounter
between the two is an extraordinary piece of emotional expulsion and violence. The
simulated sex is only a shade away from real. There is no Brechtian distancing
in that scene.
Tandiwe “Nofirst” Lungisa plays the string instrument and is a type of
ancestral spirit that hovers over the play. Helesi is the classic mother who
sees and knows a great deal but is unable to control the situation.
This is a powerful production with outstanding acting and directing. The
sexual encounter between John and Julie is not the most violent scene in the
production. The final act of Mies Julie
is about as gory and shocking as you want to see. It is staged brilliantly.
A word about the Athens Festival. If all you hear about Greece is
financial gloom and doom, you are reading the wrong papers. During June and
July there are over thirty theatrical productions in theatres around Athens and
in Epidaurus. In addition to classical Greek plays, you can see theater
companies from across Europe. There are concerts, dance groups, film festivals
even Vietnamese circus.
If that sound too arcane, you can see Kiss Me, Kate, Tosca and
even Arden
of Faversham. How’s that for wide ranging choices!
_________
Mies Julie by Yaël
Farber based on August Strindberg’s Miss
Julie was performed om June 11-13, 2015 at Peiraios 260, Athens, Greece. www.greekfestival.gr
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