Julie (2018) is Polly Stenham's contemporary rewrite of Strindberg's Miss Julie (which I haven't read or seen, so there's a task for this summer), and it tells us a story we might already know well: crazy rich beautiful not-that-young-anymore woman who has failed in life due to neglectful parents is lost, drinks and does drugs, is horribly inappropriate with her staff, and is generally miserable. On the night we caught her, she is also trying to seduce her father's driver, who is engaged to be married to her maid (with whom she shares the typical mistress-maid tension that comes from emotional intimacy mediated by money and status).

I went to see the NTL transmission yesterday; it started off with an interesting interview with the director and playwright and finished off with a whimper, with some depth in between.

So what are my feelings on it?




Well, I'm ambivalent.

On the one hand, I was profoundly impacted by Vanessa Kirby's Julie. The play on wealthy command, sexual force, and emotional vulnerability was carried out tremendously. Eric Kofi Abrefa's Jean is also great. His delivery of "Why are you so unhappy?" was tremendous.

The set represents the epitome of ambivalence for me. Yes, it's nicely designed. The kitchen especially lent itself to some interesting corporal tensions amongst the actors (and if the NTL cameras didn't insist on doing so many close-ups, I'm sure I'd have enjoyed them even more). And for the ending, framed by a led string of white light, it seemed to comment on the voyeuristic nature of what we have just witnessed as it mechanically drew away and faded into obscurity. Yet the party sections were boring, predictable, drawn out, and unnecessary. The ominous dancer section was trite, and the logical connection between both was broken on several parts. The music sections that accompanied some of the more intense scenes were simply inexplicable.

And so we move on to the negatives.

The play itself. (Oh, dear).

There was some fine dialogue in it, but the motivations of any of the characters remained unclear throughout, as their construction seemed to rely only on overused stereotypes of contemporary class issues with no depth whatsoever. In that, Julie fails absolutely in the purpose set by its very playwright. If Stenham's purpose was to investigate privilege and exposing it, why did she choose to rely on the stereotypes held by these every same privileged individuals? (This is furthered by some truly inexplicable instances of laughter from the audience, most of which didn't translate at all well with the audience in the Nescafé Theater in Santiago.)

The lack of tridimensionality and apparent motivations made the ending completely undeserved and underwhelming; while I'll be thinking about some particular exchanges between Kristina and Julie, and Julie and Jean for quite a long time, the ending and overall unravelling of the play did not move me nearly as much as Kirby's Julie did on her own.


Would I recommend it? 

I'm not entirely sure. There is great acting in it, that is certain (also, the chemistry between Kirby, Abrefa, and Thalassa Teixeira is amazing). Yet as a whole, it seems to fall short. It did resonate with me thematically, but I have to wonder whether a good staging of the original or of After Miss Julie wouldn't be much more impactful.