Mies Julie

In this stormy adaptation of August Strindberg’s classic play, Miss Julie, South African director Yael Farber, who’s been praised in the past for her adaptations of Julius Caesar (Sezar) and The Oresteia trilogy (Molora), has created a forbidding, intensely sexual landscape. It’s set wholly within a kitchen in a house in the Eastern Cape, and there’s a vivid sense of the dangerous world outside and the violent societal beliefs that still linger in South Africa nearly 20 years after the end of apartheid.

Farber really makes the work her own, so familiarity with Strindberg’s original story is unnecessary. Julie is the unbalanced daughter of a Boer landowner, who’s just been jilted by her fiancé. She turns up in the kitchen drunk, beseeching John—the son of the house cook, who she has known since childhood—to dance with her. At first resistant, John’s life-long tangle with Julie’s existence is slowly laid bare until the strong sexual tension between them comes to an aggressive climax, and everything falls apart.

This is a stunning re-imagining, its oppressive feel enhanced by a bewitchingly eerie score, composed and performed by Daniel and Matthew Pencer. Hilda Cronje and Bongile Mantsai ooze chemistry as Julie and John, drawing us into their sticky web of emotions as they furiously renegotiate their relationship. But it’s the strength of Farber’s imagination that really carries Mies Julie along to its blood-soaked finale, proving that it’s not just Shakespeare who can travel through time and space and still remain shockingly relevant.