I'm going to stick my neck out with an assertion I can't possibly prove: this show at the Riverside Studios is the most theatrically exciting production playing anywhere in London. Mies Julie, written and directed by Yael Farber, is the latest in a line of South African plays that have travelled here in the last decade or two and set the London stage alight.
Farber triumphantly overturns the conventional wisdom that writers should never direct their own work with a production that drew rave reviews at last year's Edinburgh Fringe. A reinvention of Strindberg's Miss Julie, It lasts less than 90 minutes and is packed with sexual, racial and political tension from the opening moments.
The set is a rectangle of dark red clay tiles, a kitchen floor over which an electric ceiling fan spins lazily. There's a kitchen table, chairs, a cooker, a birdcage and sets of rubber boots and farm tools. In this isolated Afrikaner farmstead in the parched Karoo, waiting for the rain, farm worker John (Bongile Mantsai) and troubled farmer's daughter Julie (Hilda Cronje) dance a ballet of frustrated desire that announces the story before a word is spoken. The unrelenting tension of their doomed relationship is broken only by Christine (Thoko Ntshinga), John's birth mother and Julie's mother-figure and one-time nurse. John and Julie are linked like siblings by childhood memories, by a common sense of place and roots, by their relationship to Christine and by their suppressed desire for each other. But they are divided not so much by race and class -- this is the real insight of Farber's play -- as by a fierce rivalry for possession of the land. Farber turns Strindberg's play into an authentically South African drama, packed with tension, violence and symbolism. I'm no expert on Strindberg, but there's something about his writing that lends itself to reinvention. I remember a great production at the Donmar a few years ago of Patrick Marber's After Miss Julie, set in 1940s England, with Richard Coyle and the mesmerising Kelly Reilly.
Hilda Cronje gives a performance of startling erotic power as Julie, taunting John into a sexual game that can only end in tragedy. When she tries to persuade him to run away with her 'We could run a hotel' the audience knows that the dream of escape is bogus. These two products of the 'new' South Africa are just as trapped as Christine, a product of the old apartheid South Africa. Farber's play conjures up this unbridgable historical divide brilliantly, using the bold device of an ancestor/singer to patrol the fringes of the stage like a silent Greek chorus.
I'm trying to make a list of the South African theatre I've seen in London over the past few years, from The Island with John Kani and Winston Tshona, to The Suit, directed by Peter Brook, and including The Mysteries and spectacularly original operas such as The Magic Flute and Venus and Adonis. They have all left an indelible mark, and so has this one.
If I were forced to make a criticism, I would say the dialogue is a little uneven. At it's best it has a sparseness worthy of Pinter or Beckett, but at moments it lapses into portentousness: 'A storm is coming to this farm, there is anger on the wind'. But the physical power of the two central performers easily sweeps aside the moments when Farber makes the words too explicit.
This play will run until May 19. Go and see it.
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