Miss Julie then and Now
PATRICK KEALEY
As a seasoned actor and director, I often reflect on why I’ve chosen the projects I have. I often think that the plays one arrives at for unconscious reasons can turn out to be the most interesting and personally rewarding. I once directed a production of Lorca’s classic Yerma. Half way through rehearsals I realised that Yerma’s grief that she would never have a child mirrored in some way my own dawning awareness that, as a gay man in my mid-thirties, I was never destined to become a father. But I hadn’t been remotely aware, when I began working on that play, that I had anything in common with Lorca’s portrait of stifling Andalusian village peasant life.
Ross Drury as John and Rachel Kennedy as Christine: rehearsals
I chose to suggest Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie to the Stables Theatre for a whole mixture of reasons. First, it’s a brilliant script, an update of Strindberg’s extraordinary 1888 classic that was so scandalous it was banned worldwide. Next, Marber has cleverly chosen to set his version on the famous election night of July 1945 when Labour won a landslide victory. While riotous drunken celebrations go on outside, a class war is fought in the bedroom inside and so British class politics becomes an essential theme. Plus, in the wake of another Labour landslide victory 80 years later, this seemed as good a time as any to reflect on the journey we’ve taken since then: from post-war optimism and hope, to the state of the nation now.
After Miss Julie is about the search for intimacy, the sometimes fatally destructive power of desire and a visceral sado-masochistic love/hate relationship with the body, in particular thwarted female pleasure. This is all set alongside the limitations of class mobility, and a theme of servitude. It boasts three fantastic roles, for actors to play out a dangerous destructive game somewhere between a menage à trois and a dance of death. For it to work it requires actors to be fearless, vulnerable and raw. As in the best plays, all of its major themes–sex, class, power and money – are absolutely relevant today.
Bring a friend, or a date, along with you. Like it or loathe it, I guarantee you’ll have plenty to talk about in the bar afterwards.
Patrick Kealey is artistic director of Theatre Nation, theatrenation.org. After Miss Julie plays at The Stables Theatre from Friday 7 to Saturday 15 February. Booking: stablestheatre.co.uk/after-miss-julie Or ring Stables Box Office daily 10.30am -1.00pm on 01424 423221
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