Times and theatrical fashions change, but some works endure. August Strindberg wrote Miss Julie in 1888. For the first production in Paris, directed by André Antoine for his Théâtre Libre in 1893, the playwright wrote a preface that has come to be considered one of the core texts defining naturalism. It would be another two years before the Lumière brothers presented the first public showing of their cinematographic films, showing real people performing everyday actions. In the decades since, we have become used to seeming realities on screens large and small, as well as on stages and in immersive-style circumstances.
The first performance of Miss Julie caused, as Antoine wrote, “an enormous sensation... [on account of] the subject, the setting and the concentration of the action into a single, 90-minute act”. What was new to Parisian audiences then is simultaneously standard and old-fashioned today. Yet Miss Julie remains riveting. Tom Littler’s production of this new text by playwright Howard Brenton (from Agnes Broome’s literal translation) shows why.
The production, keeping the period setting, highlights the interplay between what is evanescent (time; place – elegantly evoked in Louie Whitemore’s design) and what endures (birdsong; midsummer’s eve carousing; Sunday church bells – expressed through Max Pappenheim’s sound design). These contrasts shade the encounter between Julie (the daughter of the house) and Jean (her father’s valet), in the household kitchen, domain of Kristin, the cook (Jean’s fiancee). Their passion of an instant will be judged by a longer-term measure. The shifting timescales also resonate into our present: class relations have changed but hope-destroying differences in status created by social inequalities endure.
Finely balanced, well-wrought, emotionally charged performances from Charlotte Hamblin (Julie), James Sheldon and Izabella Urbanowicz make the play as real and sensational now as ever and as socially and politically pertinent.
• Miss Julie is at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, until 3 November
