Theatre review: pulsing eroticism and galvanising hate in Mies Julie

Mies Julie
Saturday 17 August, Oxford Playhouse
World tour commences 2014

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An insistent drone pervades the still air. Red light seeps through the mist, casting elusive shadows amidst the sparse set. A slowly rotating ceiling fan catches the eye, slicing the air with ominous intent, presaging the unrelenting suspense to come. And thus the scene is set for one of the most formidably visceral, psychologically afflicting plays of the decade.

Director Yael Farber has taken August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, a tale of power, lust and class limitations, and thrust into its melting pot the cataclysmic catalyst of post-apartheid racial tension. Julie is the white daughter of a South African farm owner; John is the black farm hand to whom she directs her quivering desire one hot night, with devastating consequences. What follows is a heady battle between man and woman, black and white, master and servant, colonial domination and native subjugation, intellect and physicality, love and lust, self and self-destruction.

Every movement in this play is exquisitely choreographed to feel at once naturalistic and aesthetically sublime. The physicalisation of John and Julie’s conflicting impulses forms a sparring dance that leaps across the stage and draws you into its gravitational pull. The capitulation of their coupling is an erotic, animalistic union that seems at once inevitable and catastrophic, epitomising the irresistibility of John and Julie’s subconscious need to play out the impossible, irrefutable differences between them.

Hilda Cronjé as Julie exudes sexuality and uses her commanding, almost metallic voice to augment the purposeful thrusts of her physical and emotional needs. But there is something about her that is not only unlikable but also slightly irritating – it makes her initial maltreatment of John hard to endure, and her interactions with her beloved nanny and John’s mother Christine (a stoic, spiritual performance from Zoleka Helesi) feel insincere. But as John, Bongile Mantsai is truly transfixing. His vocal control and bodily power belie a man who at once knows what he wants and has no idea how to achieve it. His instinctive reactions to Julie are brilliantly conditioned not by, as William Golding puts it, ‘a civilisation that knew nothing of him but was in ruins’, but by his own natural moral compass and his proud self-control. He resists Julie’s brazen advances with impressive rigour, relenting only after he has warned her she goes too far: ‘I am only a man’.

Farber’s consummate production perfectly complements the actors’ power. The portentous music, performed live on laptop and saxophone by Mark Fransman and Brydon Bolton, creates an atmosphere taut with reluctant, unresolved cadences and dissonant chords. This is occasionally punctuated by the eerie interjections of renowned Xhosa musician Tandiwe Lungisa as one of John’s spectral ancestors, added to Strindberg’s original cast by Farber to prowl the stage with guttural murmurings that shake the soul. And Patrick Curtis’s set design, a sparsely populated kitchen in which all the action takes place, provides the obstacles around which John and Julie can perform their mating dance and destruction.

Farber’s crowning achievement is successfully, agonizingly to cleave the timeless concerns of Strindberg’s story to the very specific concerns of post-apartheid South Africa. She slowly strips away the layers of grime, sweat and skin that cloak John and Julie in social convention and ancestral history, until they are laid bare with just their passions to speak for them. Farber then builds up the layers again, excruciatingly, one by one, until there is no way they can overcome the impenetrable barriers between them. Mistress and servant dream of escape and equality, but they only prove to themselves and to the shellshocked audience that they cannot undo the binding reality of ‘the new South Africa, where miracles leave us exactly where we began’.

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Book review: Man Booker Prize longlisted novel The Lowland

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Publishes 26 September
Review first appeared on We Love This Book

'at once blisteringly specific and edifyingly universal'

Jhumpa Lahiri’s masterful account of two boys growing up in 1970s Calcutta,The Lowland, has been nominated for this year's Man Booker Prize. It tackles the nature of memory, the mutability of time and the impossibility of true communication, while examining how the boys' tragic experiences echo through generations to come.

Amid the growing allure of Naxalite Marxism, inseparable brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra mature to lead very different lives, with different ideals. As Udayan becomes embroiled in communist politics and Subhash forsakes his roots to move to America, their bond undergoes a partition that begins an ineluctable series of partitions – physical, emotional, political and psychological – which punctuate Lahiri’s intricate exploration of what it means to feel isolated, to feel whole and to feel loved.

To read the rest of the review, see here.

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Guardian Witness, A Book That Changed Me: T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems

In praise of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
On Guardian Witness

Every dreary day that I walk over London Bridge with hoardes of city workers streaming towards me in their grey suits, against a grey sky, I think of T.S. Eliot’s crowd who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’.

In this he encapsulates a sense of banal futility that still pervades our world now, and yet when I think of his Selected Poems I do not think of them negatively. To me they are full of necessary realism, of perfectly articulated truth and, ultimately, of hope.

I once read 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud to myself, sitting at my kitchen table at the age of 21, panicking about what to do with my life. It made me feel so calm, so accepting of the fact that we cannot squeeze the universe into a ball and know what to do with it, that my panic receded into unexpected contentment. The commonplace elegance of his words, the utter joy in linguistic play and the profound, enduring resonance of his words turns even the most depressing of thoughts into beauty. It makes the things that sadden me in this world seem but fragments within a more positive whole.

To read on Guardian Witness, see here.
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