August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie is lauded as a great work, but I’m not so sure about that. It’s a terse, cold play that examines an archetypal hysterical female, locked into rigid ideas of sex and class, as if she were a bug under a jar. It is scarily persistent, though, and Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie is the rare reimagining of a classic play that may actually improve upon the original. This passionate reworking shifts the setting to a country estate outside London in 1945—when the differences between lower and upper classes were supposedly dissolving—and strives to understand Strindberg’s confused characters instead of just diagnosing them.

Miss Julie (Sienna Miller) is the privileged daughter of the manse, a haughty vixen clearly taken with John (Jonny Lee Miller), her father’s chauffeur. She strides into the kitchen oblivious to the fact that John and his maybe-fiancée, the solid and religious Christine (Marin Ireland), might be wanting some time alone. No: She demands that John must come outside and dance with Miss Julie; he must pour her a drink; he must, humbly and erotically, kiss her shoe. John, whose identity is shaped entirely by his job serving her family, at first resists, then succumbs to her manipulative seductions by confessing his lifelong love, and finally grows repulsed as their ill-matched plans for each other unfold. They humiliate and degrade one another, practically searing brands into each other’s skin.

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Class Wars
Patrick Marber updates Strindberg.

Patrick Marber’s “After Miss Julie” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the American Airlines), a version of August Strindberg’s gnarly, pathfinding 1888 tragedy about class division and desire, puts a new engine in an old chassis; the problem is internal combustion. In transposing the play from late-nineteenth-century Sweden to England in July, 1945, on the night of the British Labour Party’s landslide victory over Winston Churchill and the Conservatives at the end of the Second World War—a paradigm shift that would usher in the welfare state—Marber strips much of the need from the characters’ conflict and gums up the dramatic machinery. As a result, the vehicle accelerates swiftly, only to lose traction and spin out of control.

Of the many circumstances that drive the original, aristocratic Miss Julie into her kitchen to dance with the valet—dusk, the Midsummer festival, her period, her broken engagement, her father’s absence from their stately home—the most essential is her hysteria. As we learn in the play’s first lines, Miss Julie has a habit of making a reckless spectacle of herself. By turning sexual and social decorum on its head, she projects her craziness onto others: they end up confounded, instead of her. Alternately sadistic and seductive, her manic behavior broadcasts her suicidal stalemate. She wants to be “under the ground,” she says early in the original play. She feels the immanence of decline, and she uses her wounds as a lure. “I am coming down in the world,” she admits to Jean, the valet. He, by contrast, is defined by his desire to rise. Each needs something in the other, though they don’t need each other. Jean sees Miss Julie and her wealth (consciously) as a chance at life; Miss Julie sees Jean and his forcefulness (unconsciously) as a chance at death.

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A year after adding screencaps from the film itself, I have now added screencaps of the The Edge Of Love DVD extras. Despite the fact that the film is pretty serious, it looks like they had a great time filming it! There are some great shots of Sienna in here – particularly from the Gag Reel – and she looks so gorgeous in this film

• DVD Screencaptures – Looking Over: ‘The Edge Of Love’ – Interviews x244
• DVD Screencaptures – Deleted Scenes x77
• DVD Screencaptures – Gag Reel x191
• DVD Screencaptures – Photo Gallery x4

To stop this page from looking so bare because of the new news system, I’ve added screencaps from a new interview by Mail Online (watch it here), which features footage from After Miss Julie. It appears to be a press interview for the stage production, as in one part you can see her co-stars Jonny Lee Miller and Marin Ireland.

Thanks to ‘Green‘ for downloading this video for us.

• Mail Online (UK) – October 21st 2009 x133

As part of the ’site re-vamp’ mentioned on the sidebar << and in some previous posts, we are converting to a new news system that is much more flexible and easy for us and you to use. And what better time to start using it that on the 1st of a new month?! I haven't converted the old news over yet because it's going to take a bit of work, but you can view all previous updates in our Archives, and once everything is on this news system you will be able to browse through old archives and search for stuff much more easily.

I think I’m also going to take down the content navigation links whilst I work on tidying up/updating all the sections too and then I’ll re-open them as they’re done.

Remember you can always send us your comments, questions, suggestions, contributions, feedback etc. etc. to help us improve the site – just send me an email at jess @ sienna-miller.org (no spaces) or use the contact form.