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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: After Miss Julie A Clash of Class
By Harry Haun
23 Oct 2009
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After Miss Julie stars Sienna Miller and Marin Ireland with Jonny Lee Miller; guests Anna Wintour, Rachel McAdams and Claire Danes with Hugh Dancy
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Meet the first-nighters at the Broadway opening of After Miss Julie.
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A heady rush of Midsummer night's steam enveloped the American Airlines Theatre Oct. 23 with the arrival of Patrick Marber's 2004 play called After Miss Julie, after August Strindberg's bedrock study of sex as the great leveler of class.
As you may already know, someone's in the kitchen with Julie, and it seems to be an inside job. It seems to be her father's valet, John and, by Jove, it is. While these two throw proprieties and station out the window to create a new and tragically imperfect union, social barriers are similarly toppling outside the estate.
The main event is a meeting of Millers the serenely stunning Sienna Miller vs. the hunky, compact Jonny Lee Miller both Brits making the transatlantic crossing to debut on Broadway. They are unrelated, other than the erotic rough-and-tumble power play at hand. There is a third character on the premises Christine, the cook and John's fiancιe (Marin Ireland). Mostly, she sleeps, on stage and off, through all the Saturday night fever going on around her, but she wakes up in time to drag John off to the church just as he is in mid-elopement with the lady of the manor. Mark Brokaw referees er, directs.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but all this takes place on July 26, 1945. "There is a long and boring reason for that, but it's true," the playwright offered after the show. "Strindberg set his play on Midsummer's eve in the Swedish calendar, which is the longest day of the summer and, traditionally in Sweden, it's a kind of bacchanalian, let-your-hair-down, celebratory night where strange things can happen. I needed to find an English equivalent. We English don't really do much celebrating, but, on this particular Midsummer's eve, England was celebrating celebrating the end of the Second World War and the beginning of a new Labour government, roughly equivalent to the Obama Moment last year. There was a sense things were changing. There would be more social justice, more movement between the classes."
The date marked the start of the entrenched upper-crusts' crumbling decline. The head-strong and self-destructive Miss Julie embraced the fate of her class and was seen right before the play begins, kicking up her heels with the locals in town. Once the play begins, her democratic spirit intensifies, and she lustfully lasers in on the family's heretofore faithful servant, who, knowing his place, loved her from afar.
Marber said he cut himself some slack doing the adaptation, eschewing a line-for-line translation. "No, I've been quite free and quite liberal with it. The action is sort of the same story, told differently." As for his objective in redoing the original text, he said, "I suppose I wanted to simplify and clarify a few things. Strindberg's play is quite mystical in places. I'm not a very mystical person so I think I wrote a tighter, tauter play that Strindberg. I'm not saying it's better. I'm just saying it's leaner."
Most of his writing these days is for the movies. "I've just done a screenplay of an Ian McEwan novel called 'Saturday,' and I'm now working on the screenplay of a Zoe Heller novel called 'The Believers.' Zoe Heller wrote 'Notes on a Scandal,' which I adapted into a movie four years ago."
He said he hadn't given up on playwriting. "I'm trying," he sighed, "but it's slow."
Director Brokaw is moving on to other things, too: On Monday, he starts rehearsals up at Yale Rep on Pop Pop as in Bang, it being a musical about the shooting of Andy Warhol. Randy Harrison is the shot, and Leslie Kritzer is the shootee. "It's written by Maggie Kate Coleman and Anna Jacobs, who graduated in 2008 from the MFA program at NYU."
He had seen a couple of Miss Julies in the past and counted himself a fan of Marber's overhaul. "I think the thing I am most moved by is that, in that constant power struggle between men and women, class is still alive. It's not something that changes. It's evergreen. It's something that is always valid to look back on and explore again. What I'm haunted by in this play is just that relationship how they can love each other and, at the same time, be so cruel to each other and, at the same time, need each other so much. That's what will always be current in this play."
He gave his cast full credit for the valor and fearlessness in putting the play over. "I'm proudest of their work. The actors are all terrific. They've been very brave in the kind of emotional commitment they give this play, which is very demanding."
Brokaw exhibited a little bravery himself by giving Christine a protracted stretch of dramatic inactivity; she's left abandoned on stage for a small eternity to putter around the kitchen. "It's in the play," he quickly pointed out. "Actually, when it was written, it was considered to be very controversial for that reason. Patrick, very wisely I think, decided to keep that part of the play alive in his version of the play."
He estimated that this was about two and a half minutes of dead space, but Ireland, who has to execute it, believed it closer to three and a half. "Strindberg called that section a pantomime and said something funny in an essay in the preface 'The actress playing Christine in the pantomime should actually behave as if she's really alone' like, it was a revolutionary idea, a big step to have naturalism in theatre!
"In the original and in Patrick's version, it's laid out first as a big task, but we quickly discovered, after the first few days of staging it, that there are lots of other things that just have to be accomplished. Basically, we worked up a to-do list. We would sorta look around, and then it would be like 'Well, what do you need to do next?'
"Honestly, for me, it became about threading together each little thing, and then we were able to layer in the emotional narrative on top of the narrative of just kinda getting this done and that done. It's incredibly liberating. I don't know if I have ever felt quite so relaxed on the stage as doing that. It's really just sorta doing your task."
The flighty, dismissive way Christine is treated by Miss Julie in their final scene together "You'll find a husband" drew some opening-night titters, and this wasn't the first time, Ireland admitted. "That really surprised us until we realized how tense the section right before it was. We realized, 'Oh, people are really waiting. They really want to get a release and they're really kinda hopefully thrilled to see the two of us on stage together again at that moment after all that's gone down.'"
Should she ever need an atmosphere soak, I suggested Ireland check out Five Napkin Burger at 45th and Ninth. The dιcor echoes the sprawling country-estate kitchen that set designer Allen Moyer made for After Miss Julie. Indeed, it could handily pass for any production of Miss Julie. Continued...
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