Katie Mitchell decided to enter Miss Julie by the backdoor. With premeditated breaking and entering, accompanied by cameras that precede and follow, step by step, the cook Christine, and closely examine her in her most ordinary gestures. However much Strindberg considered Christine as a minor character, the British director was eager to nevertheless give her the keys of the play. She thus turns its perspectives upside-down, barely keeping the necessary references so that the framework of the Swedish playwright's work remains visible: Jean, the footman, abandons his fiancée for Miss Julie, the master's daughter. What remains of the love affair is only what passes within reach of Christine's eyes and ears. Her desire - our desire - to know is urgent enough for her to partially open the doors and make the bursts of decisive voices that set the two lovers, Julie and Jean, against each other, intelligible, through partitions and floor boards. Serving the cook, Katie Mitchell has mobilized a mighty ally: the cinema. She has used five cameras in a skilful shot reverse shot, between theatre and film. On stage, as in the film that is being shot live right before us, Christine's private drama is played out. She can be both behind and in front of the camera, in the process of filming and being filmed. As if the servant had total control over the cinema form and the editing and the young lady Julie had to content herself with appearing, more than in her turn, in the continuity on stage. Around close-ups of Christine's hands preparing kidneys for Jean or smoothing her hair, in the sounds of water as haunting as life that flows and irremediably flees, a form of sweetly bitter visual and sound harmony radiates in which the sounds, dubbed live, and the music, played live, blend with Saint Jean's cries of joy and the whistling of a blackbird, which endlessly greets the dusk of a world. JLP
Distribution
adaptation Katie Mitchell
direction Katie Mitchell, Leo Warner
translation and dramaturg Maja Zade
scenography and costumes Alex Eales
music Paul Clark
lighting Philip Gladwell
sound Gareth Fry, Adrienne Quartly
cameras Krzysztof Honowski, Stefan Kessissoglou
sound effects Maria Aschauer, Lisa Guth
with Jule Böwe, Cathlen Gawlich, Lisa Guth, Tilman Strauß, Luise Wolfram
cello Chloe Miller
Production
production Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Berlin)
avec le soutien du British Council et de la Scène nationale de Cavaillon