Julie - Lyttleton

Natalie Dormer was in After Miss Julie at the Young Vic, and she was indeed brilliant.

Having had 24hrs after seeing Julie and time to digest and reflect on what I saw on stage last night, I have to say I agree 100% with nash16 in that VK really is wasted in this production despite all her best efforts in showing Julie’s downfall. I just think the script is that poor that all you get are very bland characters in Jan and his gf who you really don’t get to know as there is so little character development with them over the 80mins. 

I appreciate this production is still in early previews, but I don’t know how you can improve it before press night without some serious work with the script. You definitely don’t need 10 mins of pointless dancing at the start. All I got from that was a serious headache from the strobe lighting! Time could have been better spent with the 3 main characters and developing their characters and relationship with each other. 

In an earlier post I questioned the racial casting issue. I still stand by that even now. Personally, what I saw on stage last night made absolutely no difference with what race any of the characters were. For me, it didn’t add or detract from the plot and would question the motives of the director in going down this route as ultimately it is about Julie’s mental health and downfall, and what that has to do with a persons race is questionable at best. If the most shocking thing I saw on stage last night was a woman using a blender for an act of evil rather than Julie’s actual demise over 80 mins then the production for me hasn’t worked.

The one thing that people tend to know about Strindberg is his pathological misogyny. I haven’t seen this yet but any modern adaptation of his play (and there are many, given the problematic original) has to take note of that. It is unsurprising that generations of men have lauded his original version as a searing study of sexual politics, as it is so obviously written as a male fantasy. At this moment in history, it’s a good time to have another look at it. Given that most papers/websites reviewing ‘The Writer’ managed to work out that having a woman doing so might be more illuminating, it’ll be interesting to see if they do that here.

A few quotes from Strindberg to clarify what makes taking his play and making it both less male and addressing questions of race mean, in this context. My apologies for relaying such horrific views but I think the conversation requires it. Strindberg, in letters, translated by Meyer, wrote 'Black man is bad man...If I rate the black race below the white, it is grounded on experiences which have shown that the black are inferior to the white.'' Then again, how about 'Woman, being small and foolish and therefore evil.....should be suppressed, like barbarians and thieves. She is useful only as ovary and womb.'' You can almost see his contemporary through time, the incel keyboard warrior or alt right frat boy. Denying Strindberg his ‘slut shaming as art’ is long overdue, whether in this version or a future one.

Personally, the best version I’ve seen I think, was Katie Mitchell’s stage/film version which used the camera to have us watch it through the eyes of the maid.

Means her world is so middle class and white that *gasp* FALLING IN LOVE WITH A BLACK MAN OF A LOWER CLASS is, like, totally radical, and, like, issue-based? And relevant? And yah.

(I really don't like Stenham can ya tell...)

No problem

Mixed-raced marriages/relationships have been commonplace for so long that it's not radical in any way! Ditto for same-sex relationships.

Radical would be something like a black Julie and a white Jean - if only because having a black woman in the position of power is still rare. 

From her Wikipedia entry:

"She attributes her love of theatre to her father (who was chair of various arts organisations such as the Royal College of Art and Institute of Contemporary Arts), as he took her to various shows from a young age, including many at the Royal Court Theatre which would later stage her first play.

Educated at the private boarding school Wycombe Abbey and later Rugby, she spent a gap year travelling and working for the Ambassador Theatre Group and the Arcola Theatre. It was during this time that she enrolled in the Royal Court Young Writers Programme and wrote her first play."

So I don't know how connected she was during her time working for ATG and the Arcola, but certainly a privileged upbringing with some posh schools involved.

And from his obit:

"As well as building a modern art collection of his own and for Unilever, Stenham had chaired the Royal College of Art (1979-81) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (1977-87). He had also been on the boards of the Museum of London, the Design Museum, the Architectural Association, the Theatres Trust and other arts organisations."

Lyn Gardner and Ben Brantley from NYT (rightly) condemned That Face as a trite piece of blame-the-bad-mother writing.

Fair play to Stenham for having a work ethic, but never forget she has never needed cash in her life (she has bought an art gallery), and so "real life" will never get in the way of churning out sub-par scripts in full, unlike her peers who have to work full-time and find time to write around their working hours.

And in the words of Fraulein Schneider, so what?

That wouldn't work at all in the context of the play - the point of the play is that Julie's relationship has to be in some way taboo and disapproved of by her father. In the original it is due to social class. In this version it appears (very improbably) to be because Jean is black - a muslim Julie and a white Jean might work, so her old father might actually disapprove of the match in some circumstances. 

I should think there are plenty of black (and other ethnicities) parents that would be displeased by their daughter having a relationship with a white man.

In terms of "the context of the play" - adaptations really need to keep the essence of the play; I think the context is a bit more up for grabs.

Do you think it made any difference to the play in your opinion about having an interracial couple as has been discussed previously? 

As I was watching this I kept wondering who had done the choreography and wishing they’d got Ann Yee. I just checked the credits and guess what? Ann Yee was the choreographer. Not her best work, although some of Julie’s moves are really good. In some ways I wish they’d just had Julie dancing on her own and left the rest to our imaginations. Yee did the amazing choreography for Simon Stephens’ Birdland, which Andrew Scott starred in (best thing in that play) and taught Ralph Fiennes a brilliant dance for the film A Bigger Splash.