Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg’s groundbreaking look at class differences, sexual politics and theater staging, Miss Julie, has been dissected, analyzed, criticized and reworked in various genres since it was written in 1888.— as has he.
For generations, stage and film directors around the world have given their takes on his story of an aristocrat, Miss Julie, and her encounters with her father’s manservant, Jean, after an alcohol-fueled Midsummer Eve’s party and the repercussions for all involved.
British theater and opera director Katie Mitchell gained fame for her multi-media works and for telling stories from a female perspective, and her 2010 production of Miss Julie for Berlin’s Schaubuhne theater was no exception.
Photo courtesy of Thomas Aurin
Her production will be performed at the National Theater in Taipei this weekend, for three shows starting tomorrow night.
Alhough Mitchell has worked primarily in Europe in recent years, Miss Julie was her first in Berlin and her first for the Schaubuhne, which was founded in 1962.
Thomas Ostermeier, who took over as Schaubuhne’s artistic director in 1999, turned it into a repertory-style theater with a permanent ensemble of actors. The cast that will be performing at the National Theater is largely the original one, with Jule Bowe reprising her role as Kristin, with Tilman Strauss as Jean and Luise Wolfram and Miss Julie.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Cummiskey
The big difference with Mitchell’s take on Strindberg’s play is that she utilized a film crew on stage to capture the action, and shifted the focus of the story to the perspective of what was traditionally one of the minor characters, the family cook Christine (Kristin in this production), who is Jean’s fiance and a witness, albeit sometimes a sleeping one, to Julie and Jean’s pursuit of one another.
Mitchell tapped Leo Warner, cofounder of the Britain-based Fifty Nine Productions and a frequent collaborator, to work with her on the live video side of the production and they share director credits for the show.
Mitchell and Warner have been credited with pioneering a new medium — “live cinema” and that concept seems well-suited for Miss Julie because Strindberg’s play was conceived as a new medium, a call to revolution of the standard Swedish theater conventions of his day. He wanted to see theater that was as natural as possible, free from all artifice, because he fell that this would lead to a greater understanding of humanity.
By using a black-clad film crew to provide video footage of the stage action, the audience is provided with a much closer look at the character’s actions and interactions as they occur on stage.
There are a couple of caveats that come along with this Miss Julie production. One is that it is not suitable for those under the age of 12, which one would think would be self-evident. The others are that there is partial nudity, and that latecomers might not be admitted.
The play runs 75 minutes and will be performed in German with Chinese and English surtitles.
There will be a post-show discussion in the theater lobby after Sunday’s matinee.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under