After Miss Julie review: An overly polite take on Strindberg in Fermanagh

After Miss Julie
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
★★★

Wherever we find Miss Julie, we discover someone transformed. That is as true of August Strindberg’s 1888 play, set during a bacchanalian Midsummer’s Eve in Sweden, as it is for every translation, adaptation or transposition since. Before she even appears, we hear that Julie is “mad”, “crazy”, “bewitched”, “wild” – or, in Patrick Marber’s 2003 version, “off her head”. Frankly, you can’t wait to meet her.

Marber’s play, set in London in 1945, gave another context for this dangerous game of seduction between the mistress of the manor and her father’s servant: Labour’s pivotal election victory. It found an arch correspondence with another giddy promise of equality, never be fully honoured. For Prime Cut’s new staging, the play has been moved again, to VE Day in Fermanagh, a transposition that raises more questions than answers.

Modestly altered, the play makes necessary sacrifices (Winston Churchill jokes get the heave), while leaving some distracting vestiges (Julie taunts John for being “a secret Tory”). In director Emma Jordan’s staging, though, the class gulf is accentuated. Where Ciarán McMenamin as John and the excellent Pauline Hutton as his betrothed, Christine, speak in earthy Enniskillen tones, Lisa Dwyer Hogg’s Julie has the trilling cadence of a Pathé newsreader. She’s awfully posh.

Class, however, has different connotations according to context. Yael Farber's recent South African version, Mies Julie, inevitably brought race into this cauldron of desire and destruction, and a Northern Irish setting invites consideration of both sex and sects. Jordan seems to prefer accidental chimes. We still hear, for instance, that John's family have worked the land for centuries, but now it suggests something quite different. With Marber's celebrated flair for lacerating exchanges, John spits out bitter resentments whereas Julie toys with the language of subjugation, so it jars that they choose to leave religion and history off the table.

What should remain is the amperage of sexual desire, but here too the show is disappointingly polite. McMenamin makes for a warmer, voluble John, but not quite the irresistible bad boy, and Dwyer Hogg depicts a girlish coquette, carefully kicking up her heel or slinking across a table, never less than “on her head”. When John, per instruction, kisses Julie’s shoe, they break away, as though embarrassed; when they tangle later, over a razor blade, it’s more hesitant than a dance of death. It is as though the fuzzy focus lessens the fever of attraction, their destructive passion.

They are certainly gorgeous to look at, courtesy of Sarah Bacon’s exquisite costumes and stunningly intact, realistic set, where, under Ciaran Bagnall’s beautiful lighting and against Carl Kennedy’s foreboding composition, windows loom above them like prying eyes. That seals the sensation of a tastefully appointed costume drama, though, rather than its opposite: a cruel disrobing of gender and power struggles, where both Marber and Strindberg are more interested in what can be exposed.

• Until March 19th, then touring to Source Arts Centre, Thurles (22nd); Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick (23rd); Marketplace Theatre, Armagh (24th); An Grianán Theatre, Letterkenny (26th); The Mac, Belfast (March 30th-April 9)