Review-Mies Julie-Hong Kong Arts Festival
22-2-14
By: Tom Hope with Retha Stroebel
This adaptation of the Strindberg classic Miss Julie, re-written and produced by Yael Farber, takes place in a post-apartheid kitchen where the power struggle between “owner and slave” takes place during a single broody Karoo night. There is a storm brewing and squatters on the farm and drinking and dancing, all leading to a deadly battle for Julie and John when the lines between love/hate and passion/power get crossed.
The tension starts to build from the first sounds of the drums, gripping the audience with the restless pacing around the stage of Mies Julie – like an animal trapped in a cage, like a moth around a flame. The story unfolds, but what is true? Is it power or passion speaking? “We love the things our mothers love, but we hate the things that take them away from us.”
Farber manages to keep the tension taut throughout the play and not once can you just sit back and relax; the story line and the energy keeps you on the edge of your seat, your mind racing to comprehend the complexity of the story unfolding. The dialogue jumps between English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa, although mostly English. The jumps are done in such a way that international audiences can follow the play.
What really sets this play apart is how, even with a difficult subject such as irrational prejudice and South Africa’s institutionalization of it through apartheid, one gets the sense that the playwright managed to tell a story without taking sides, and without forcing the audience to take sides.…
This play is like the Karoo where it is set – not for the fainthearted. John and Julie bare pretty much all in their on-stage love-making and there is blood streaming along the way. The super-charged physicality never strives for hyper-realism; to the classic threesome of John (Bongile Mantsai), Julie (Hilda Cronje) and Christine (Thoko Ntshinga), Farber has added a shamaness (Tandiwe Nofirst Lungisa) to frame the unities of time and space. The characters exit but remain on stage. The musicians are visible throughout. A bird cage twirls in the wind like Mies Julie herself, caught in a cage of light shafting the smoke-machined mist as a ceiling fan relentlessly rotates its own specially ambient shadows across a set of earth and earthenware tiles…
This sensually symbolic setting complements the acting which at times is so stylized as to stretch credulity to near breaking point. The script’s political implications are also stretched tight - ‘it’s Freedom Day’, says Julie, as she exercises hers to the full – and, in the process, Farber pulls off a stunning ‘coup de theatre’ with her closing imagery.
Strindberg’s original worked through a landscape of newly enfranchised labour but kept its collars high and hemlines low. That such protocols should be discarded for this modernized treatment is hardly surprising. That such powerful drama should result is, perversely, all the more consequentially stunning.
Mies Julie is sold out! For more information, click here.
Comments
Errrin
A very nice school essay describing what happened on stage. But what did you think of it?
23 February 2014Kay Ross
I went to see "Mies Julie" last night. I was hoping to be overwhelmed. I wasn't. The two main actors were excellent, and parts of the play were very powerful, but too many parts were just annoying. For example, the low, rumbling sound effects for 15 minutes before the play started, and then in the first 15 minutes of the play, gave me a headache. And I couldn't suspend my disbelief when Christine came into the kitchen with a bucket of blood after causing her master's dog to miscarry its puppies. She said she'd buried the puppies - so why bring the bucket of blood into the kitchen and tip it into another bucket, for us to see? Sure, that blood became a convenient and important prop later in the play, but that felt contrived - for me, it just didn't make psychological sense for Christine to bring that bucket of blood into the kitchen.
23 February 2014Matt DeCoursey
I found this a disappointing show. The nudity and the blood should have been at the centre of the play's meaning, and weren't. The ideas involved were to one side, and it often seemed like the characters were explaining South African history to each other. As Hope and Stroebel say, the cast "keeps the tension taut throughout the play." As it appears in this production, that's a fault. A play can't be all climax and still carry meaning. The stylization of the movement didn't work for me, and I didn't know why Julie's movements were so much more stylized than John's.
26 February 2014