National Theatre of Scotland Ensemble, North Edinburgh Arts Centre and touring 2006

Julie

ONE OF THE ambitions of the National Theatre of Scotland is to increase the number of Scottish translations of foreign classics.

In October, David Harrower’s version of Schiller’s ‘Mary Stuart’ hits the stage, and here, for the new fleet-footed NTS Ensemble, Zinnie Harris takes on August Strindberg’s 1888 three-hander, ‘Miss Julie’, the salutary fable of a well-to-do young lady who breaks social taboos by having an affair with a servant.

It’s a play that depends on its historical context to make sense. Today we might still be obsessed by class, but not so much that a lady would kill herself rather than face the shame of sleeping with a butler.

In looking at the play afresh, Harris has consequently been careful not to lose the sense of a rigidly ordered society. At the same time, she has sought to bring extra political resonance to the liaison, while underplaying the streak of misogyny in Strindberg’s original.

Her solution is to shift the location to interwar Scotland, where Strindberg’s midsummer party now comes towards the end of a nine-week strike of mill workers. As the boss’s daughter, Julie is expected to be a representative of the uncaring ruling class. But as a flirtatious woman on the rebound after the departure of her fiancée, she has a self-destructive urge to cross the class divide.

In this context, her tragedy symbolises the fall of the old order. That the bright, intelligent and sexually potent butler John is left standing anticipates the social upheaval brought about by the Second World War.

This is the broader resonance of Harris’s version. What makes it work so enthrallingly on the stage, in the playwright’s own production, is the delicate dance of power relationships between Samantha Young’s Julie, Andy Clark’s John and Georgina Sowerby’s Christine, the chaste kitchen maid expecting John’s hand in marriage.

Performed with the audience on all four sides of Lizzie Clachan’s simple tiled set (the weeds poking through the flagstones hinting at a social system gone to seed), the play becomes an intimate fight to the death, the muttered, sometimes slurred conversation belying the urgency of the issues at stake.

Harris uses the small-scale of the production to her advantage, turning the audience into eavesdroppers on the pregnant pauses and forthright language of the trio: Clark as the alpha male, almost in awe of his own power; Young as a passionate woman in freefall; and Sowerby drawing huge moral strength from her quiet convictions.

If it’s hard for us to believe the necessity of Julie’s final fateful exit, we are nonetheless gripped by the interplay of ideas that leads up to it.

(Julie can be seen at Ballachulish Village Hall, 12 September; MacPhail Centre, Ullapool, 15 September; Sabhal Mor Ostaig, Skye, 19 September; Victoria Hall, Cromarty, 23 September; Thurso High School, 28 September; Craigmonie Centre, Drumnadrochit, 30 September, with additional dates in the Northeast and Borders)

© Mark Fisher, 2006

Links

• NTS