MISS JULIE
MISS JULIE, Upstairs Belvoir, 24 August-6 October 2013. Photos by Ellis Parrinder, main above: Taylor Ferguson; right: Blazey Best.
The "overture" and opening minutes of Simon Stone's re-invention of August Strindberg's 1888 class-melodrama are both the truest to his original and a clear signpost to what lies ahead in the two hours and ten minutes (including interval). In a sharp, white, minimalist and elegant kitchen Christine (Blazey Best) is cooking - as Strindberg set out in his original. From thereon it's a strange brew of old and new and not a lot of it gels - rather like contemporary chef's ego trips with their mismatched ingredients.
"Overture" (above) because she is stirring and tending a steaming pot as the audience enters the auditorium and continues to do so well after the beginning of the piece has been signalled: she's making risotto in real time. The preparation and serving of it is worthy of Audrey's Kitchen as Christine lines a bowl with a handful of rocket leaves, ladles in the rice mixture, sprinkles salt, grinds pepper, squeezes half a lemon in her strong fist and drizzles olive oil. Memo: if Blazey Best asks you over for lunch - accept.
Quite a lot happens in real time in this production, directed by Letitica Cáceres, and each instance serves as a reminder that the minutiae of everyday life is not fascinating; that's why plays were invented. Watching someone scrape plates and stack a dishwasher, for instance, is not interesting. Marginally more so, in our foodie culture, is the eating of a bowl of smoked salmon risotto, but essentially it's not interesting. Neither is the painstaking tidying of a trashed hotel room - and so on.
Miss Julie was about the clash of classes and sexual power, male and female, which is why it horrified and engrossed the turn-of-the- (20th) century audience. The middle class was rising and burgeoning, the upper class was in retreat and the lower class was on the march and banging at the gates. Transferring that basic premise imperfectly to the 21st century makes for an odd and unconvincing mix.
Class is a tricky thing to play with in the Australian context. It's the biggest element in the social fabric and is also the one that's traditionally denied. Even as Stone's odd little concoction of class warfare was being played out on Belvoir's main stage, the ABC was screening Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope's painfully clever and funny class comedy Upper Middle Bogan with Robyn Nevin - the empress of the Australian stage - as a razor-tongued upper class matriarch (who steals every scene she's in).
Christine is cook-housekeeper to an unseen master - a politician on the brink of a tilt at the prime ministership. His 16-year-old daughter Julie (Taylor Ferguson) is experiencing a combination of parental neglect, hormones and teenage resentment; she's a time bomb and she's ticking.
Shambling through this volatile situation is Jean (Brendan Cowell), a socially inept and lumpenly thuggish sort who has - inexplicably - been charged with child-minding by the would-be PM. He's also Christine's long-time fiance and he very incongruously totes a pistol. Even more inexplicable, he tells Julie - and the audience - that his previous occupation was sommelier in a high-end restaurant. As he can't or won't pronounce the word properly, it sounds even more unlikely than it looks.
Cowell's performance is flat and wooden, or taciturn and manly, depending on your viewpoint. Either way his Jean is a banal anti-hero - but in keeping with the tone and content of the script. That Jean is appealing to either Christine or Julie is bizarre as he is too aggressively snobbish to convince as rough trade and, despite his swirling of the red in the glass, he is also an unlikely social climber. He doesn't make a lot of sense and his presence has a weirdly boofy will o'the wisp quality that's irritating rather than unsettling.
Essentially, in removing the characters and setting from 19th century Europe without clearly thinking through their destination, the reason and rationale are lost. They are Australian but talk of going to France - and a plane isn't involved. Christine is a capable woman but she responds to the brattish Julie with the servility of a bygone age - and in a most un-Australian way. Similarly, Jean calling the Lolita-lassy "Miss" Julie is anachronistic and odd.
Much distraction is to be had in considering the yawning chasms of implausibility that keep opening up. More distraction in wondering why (on opening night) a majority of the audience tittered and giggled almost continuously. And further pondering at a script whose biggest laugh line was from Cowell, poring over a laptop, asking "What's your password?"
Robert Cousins (set) and Damien Cooper (lighting) are much more successful in creating the smart kitchen of the first half and the motel room of the second. Tess Schofield (costumes) catches Jean's awkwardness in an ill-fitting Lowes-style suit, and Christine's dully respectable housekeeper outfits are as sad as the woman inside them, as is Julie's childish yet provocative baby doll jim-jams.
The actors work their hearts out, but their task is a thankless one that clunks like a cracked bell. Many in the audience found it all hugely amusing, which possibly says a lot about how inured we are as a society to really shitty lives and situations. Personally, I found it dull and pointless either as a new drama or as a reworking of an old one - it missed the mark.
Blazey Best is, of course, never less than compelling on a stage and in the grimly cock-eyed role of Christine she makes a transition from the opening scenes to her belated reappearance towards the end that almost succeeds in carrying off the inane improbability she's stuck with.
The most notable thing about this Miss Julie is the main stage debut of Taylor Ferguson. She is a remarkable talent: powerful, fearless, convincingly childlike one moment and ruthlessly adult the next. Her presence echoed the "first time I saw…" of Cate Blanchett all those years ago. Ferguson is an actor to watch: a star is born.
