Miss Julie by August Strindberg

Miss Julie by August Strindberg

As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture--even one, like our own, in which the boundaries of those identities have become fluid, situational and transitory.

David French's adaptation of August Strindberg's disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a count and the count's man-servant has an eerie feel of the contemporary about it. In this adaptation of>Miss Julie, French has sharpened the psychodramas of the original--scenes of conflict, desire, anger, jealousy, coercion, manipulation, exploitation, arrogance, dominance, submission and deceit--and backgrounded the historical elements of the play which have made it a favourite period-piece of the repertory theatre circuit. His revisioning of>Miss Julie foregrounds the ruptures of identity and faith that ambition and desire eternally work in their rending of social norms, strictures and conventions, and he has re-enacted them in a contemporary idiom and vernacular that virtually cries out for the casting-call of a Paris Hilton to play the lead role.

As with his adaptation of Chekhov's>The Seagull, David French, one of Canada's best-loved playwrights, has here once again paid homage to one of the enduring masters who have brought to the stage the most elemental and universal dramas of the human condition.

As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture--even one, like our own, in which the boundaries of those identities have become fluid, situational and transitory.

David French's adaptation of August Strindberg's disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a count and the count's man-servant has an eerie feel of the contemporary about it. In this adaptation of>Miss Julie, French has sharpened the psychodramas of the original--scenes of conflict, desire, anger, jealousy, coercion, manipulation, exploitation, arrogance, dominance, submission and deceit--and backgrounded the historical elements of the play which have made it a favourite period-piece of the repertory theatre circuit. His revisioning of>Miss Julie foregrounds the ruptures of identity and faith that ambition and desire eternally work in their rending of social norms, strictures and conventions, and he has re-enacted them in a contemporary idiom and vernacular that virtually cries out for the casting-call of a Paris Hilton to play the lead role.

As with his adaptation of Chekhov's>The Seagull, David French, one of Canada's best-loved playwrights, has here once again paid homage to one of the enduring masters who have brought to the stage the most elemental and universal dramas of the human condition.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. His plays include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), To Damascus (1898), The Dance of Death (1900), A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1908).

Howard Brenton was born in Portsmouth in 1942. His many plays include Christie in Love (Portable Theatre, 1969); Revenge (Theatre Upstairs, 1969); Magnificence (Royal Court Theatre,1973); The Churchill Play (Nottingham Playhouse, 1974, and twice revived by the RSC, 1978 and 1988); Bloody Poetry (FocoNovo, 1984, and Royal Court Theatre, 1987); Weapons of Happiness (National Theatre, Evening Standard Award, 1976); Epsom Downs (Joint Stock Theatre, 1977); Sore Throats (RSC,1978); The Romans in Britain (National Theatre, 1980, revived at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, 2006); Thirteenth Night (RSC,1981); The Genius (1983), Greenland (1988) and Berlin Bertie (1992), all presented by the Royal Court; Kit's Play (RADA Jerwood Theatre, 2000); Paul (National Theatre, 2005); In Extremis (Shakespeare's Globe, 2006 and 2007); Never So Good (National Theatre, 2008); The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists adapted from the novel by Robert Tressell (Liverpool Everyman and Chichester Festival Theatre, 2010); Anne Boleyn (Shakespeare's Globe, 2010 and 2011); 55 Days (Hampstead Theatre, 2012); #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (Hampstead Theatre, 2013); The Guffin (NT Connections, 2013); Drawing the Line (Hampstead Theatre, 2013); Doctor Scroggy's War (Shakespeare's Globe, 2014); Lawrence After Arabia (Hampstead Theatre, 2016); The Blinding Light (Jermyn Street Theatre, 2017), The Shadow Factory (NST City, Southampton, 2018) and Jude (Hampstead Theatre, 2019).

Collaborations with other writers include Brassneck (with David Hare, Nottingham Playhouse, 1972); Pravda (with David Hare, National Theatre, Evening Standard Award, 1985) and Moscow Gold (with Tariq Ali, RSC, 1990).

Versions of classics include The Life of Galileo (1980) and Danton's Death (1982), both for the National Theatre; Goethe's Faust (1995/6) for the RSC; a new version of Danton's Death for the National Theatre (2010); and versions of Strindberg's Dances of Death (Gate Theatre, 2013), Miss Julie (Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, & Jermyn Street Theatre, London, 2017) and Creditors (Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, & Jermyn Street Theatre, London, 2019).

He wrote thirteen episodes of the BBC1 drama series Spooks (2001-05, BAFTA Best Drama Series, 2003).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780486272818
ISBN 10	0486272818
Title	Miss Julie
Author	August Strindberg
Series	Thrift Editions
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Dover Publications Inc.
Year published	2000-02-01
Number of pages	64
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable