REVIEW: Miss Julie, Minerva Theatre ✭✭

Rosalie Craig and Shaun Evans in Miss Julie Miss Julie Minerva Theatre 26 July 2014 2 Stars

In the programme notes for her adaptation of Strindberg's Miss Julie, now playing at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, in a double bill with Black Comedy, playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz says:

"I was trying to be simply faithful to the text. But I didn't want it to feel sepia or period in any way. So it was all about the language feeling of now without it being jarring...(Julie) is in great need of affirmation. She is curious, strong, impulsive and fragile all at the same time. She is many contradictions and all of that in almost real time, which is what makes her so interesting. I don't see her as a victim. More of a brave wanderer who stumbles."

Strindberg's Miss Julie has always struck me as very much a piece of its time, a time when misogyny was de rigeur and female sexual wants, needs and desires either ignored, beaten out of consideration or scoffed at. Strindberg himself described Julie as having a degenerate and weak brain.

Strindberg set out to write a naturalistic play about a woman he considered sick and ruined. So he, at least, saw Julie as a victim - a victim of her own failings and degenerative thoughts and desires.

Watching Jamie Glover's production of Lenkiewicz' adaptation, a sense of confusion arises.

The language does have a modern feel, flavour and vocabulary, but the presentation is very old-fashioned. Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that you were watching an episode of Downton Abbey that centred on Edith, James and Ethel.

But Miss Julie was written in 1888 and by the time the Crawleys were dealing with Matthew's death even they had moved on from the point of view from which Strindberg proceeded.

There are no significant changes to Strindberg's plot. Julie dances with her servant, Jean, and then seduces him. She wants to run away with him then she rejects him. He rejects her, then wants her and then goes cold on the idea. Then she asks him to ensure her suicide and after he beheads her pet canary, she departs apparently intent on suicide. As is plain, it's not a comedy.

It's a psychological dissection of the power of female desire and the inevitability of destruction in the wake of fulfilled female sexual longing. Julie crosses out of her class into the lusty sheets of her servant and is doomed for it. (There has always been a case that Sondheim and Lapine were satirising Strindberg when the Baker's Wife dies after her upwards dalliance with Cinderella's Prince but that's another story, never mind...) By the time of Downton Abbey, Sybil could marry Branson and be happy and produce an heir and even though even Sybil dies in childbirth, it's not because of the kind of thinking that sees Julie pursue her canary to the afterlife.

So, the setting seemed contrapuntal to the play's themes, as did, by and large, the adaptation.

Lenkiewicz may not see Julie as a victim, but somewhat inevitably she is and nothing in this adaptation changes that. If the notion was to give it a fresh modern take, there are other ways that could be achieved, but Lenkiewicz' slant seems alarmingly Strindbergian and just as unprepared to engage with modern healthy notions of liberated female libido and the possibilities of high and low born couples making good.

The cast cope as best they can in this netherworld of context.

Shaun Evans is excellent as the wily, calculating servant, Jean, who dances with and in Julie but who plays roller coaster emotions with her as he seeks the best

outcome for himself. He managed to be sexy and vile in equal measure, and left room for some empathy. It is a clever performance.

Rosalee Craig fares less well, mainly because it never seems clear in which century and against which moral prism and set of values her Julie is judged and lives (and dies). But the performance seems slightly lost; it could do with more clarity and, especially, desperation. This Julie's motives are not easily discerned.

Emma Handy is excellent as Kristin, the female servant who wants Jean herself, but only on terms acceptable to Society and God. She is brittle and sweetly caring in turns; befuddled by the wild behaviour she witnesses.

Andrew D Edwards' design is detailed and clever, and partly responsible for the under-stairs Downton Abbey feel. Costumes are good - and the effect of the decapitated canary is gruesomely achieved.

The traditional interlude of the dance of the other servants, all rejoicing in the Midsummer's Eve jollity while Julie and Jean rut in an adjoining room, is nicely handled by the ensemble under Kate Waters' eye.

Glover's production is fine enough. It's Lenkiewicz' adaptation which misses the mark. It is she who looks more like the brave wanderer who has stumbled.

Somewhat incredulously, the companion piece in this double bill, Black Comedy, an entertainment written purely for pleasure, really tells us more about sexual politics in the modern world than this take on Strindberg, whose own views have long been filed in the Male Supremacist file.