Count on a New Yorker to ask an impertinent question. At a post-show “talk-back” discussion matinee last month for After Miss Julie, presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co., one audience member couldn’t restrain himself: “Why did Roundabout think it necessary to put this very dated British play on in New York?”
Ouch—it must have hurt the staff of the Roundabout to hear that. Patrick Marber, after all, had updated—well, okay, at least reduced the interval between then and now by half----from August Strindberg’s fierce, pathbreaking 1888 drama, to the night of the Labour Party victory in the U.K. in July 1945. And the Roundabout hadn’t just gotten anyone for the adaptation—Marber had street cred with the buzz-worthy flicks Closer and Notes on a Scandal, and the nonprofit theater company had worked with him previously on Howard Katz. What could go wrong?
If the fall theater season were baseball, then the Roundabout would be batting a healthy .333, with one hit (Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, which I’ll review soon) out of three times at bat (the three shows that I have seen, or plan to, by year's end, anyway). But Bye Bye Birdie has endured some of the most ferocious reviews for a musical that the company has ever presented, and After Miss Julie would probably be DOA by now if it had been mounted by a for-profit theater company.
The “revisal”—a revival of a classic that goes beyond a new production to offer a revised script—has become practically de rigueur with Broadway musicals, whose producers undoubtedly hope that critics will stop using the dreaded cliché “dated” (maybe that audience member I saw was a critic in sheep’s clothing?).
But a revisal of a straight play has now become quite the thing, too, with John Millington Synge and Chekhov, among others, coming in for this treatment. But guess what? It doesn’t mean the results are any better.
In a way, Marber—who wrote this originally as a 1995 BBC teleplay—has attempted to do what directors of Shakespeare have done over the centuries: i.e., prove a playwright's continuing relevance by staging his plays in every time but his own.
You can almost see the wheels turn in the minds of the Roundabout powers-that-be, still in their default Anglophile mode (Sunday in the Park With George, The Philanthropist, The 39 Steps, etc.) from the last several seasons, as they considered the new setting: Hmmm…the action takes place on a night when a conservative party, after years of trying, all-consuming war, gets turned out of office resoundingly by the electorate in favor of the progressives. It’s a new dawn! So familiar! Our Blue State, Manhattan-centric audience will have no problem connecting the dots here!
But here’s the problem—Marber and director Mark Brokaw have juiced up the action (the evidence of two characters’ intercourse becomes all too evident to a third), as well as the dialogue (one lover uses the F-word), but it’s like colorizing a classic 1940 film noir: the new tones don’t enhance the impression left but detract from it. Amazingly, they’ve sensationalized and sexed everything up, only to leave a less searing work.
They did so by disregarding one of the central dictates of Strindberg’s dramaturgy: “The joy of life is in its cruel and powerful struggles.”
In detailing the fall of the young aristocrat Miss Julie, following an impulsive, mad tryst with one of her father’s hired help, the Swedish playwright vented instincts and beliefs that more than a few people would find objectionable today: misogyny and a Darwinism as relentlessly predetermined as any credo created by John Calvin. His male servant, Jean, follows as rapid an ascent as any heat-seeking missile. Strindberg doesn’t bother to justify or sugarcoat this vision.
There’s nothing moral about any of this, any more than there’s anything remotely moral about large animals circling prey. It simply is.
In seeing how well Strindberg’s then-shocking psychological drama would translate into today’s terms, Marber & the Roundabout might have recalled the cautionary tale of Arthur Miller, who decided to adapt Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People for Broadway. So much made the play pertinent to the era of the Red Scare, Miller thought, especially the unwillingness of the townspeople to tolerate dissent. Oh, there were problems, too, with Ibsen’s version, such as the hero’s propensity to spout then-fashionable eugenics theory (very unfashionable after WWII), but Miller would take care of that.
Miller did, all right—but in the process he eliminated Ibsen’s mockery of the hero-doctor’s own naïve idealism, which made the play simultaneously entertaining and complex. The American’s Dr. Stockmann, then, became a humorless, hectoring saint that no Broadway audience wanted any part of.
Something of the same syndrome is occurring onstage at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre. Strindberg’s style is as blunt as a roundhouse blow out of nowhere that sends one to the canvass; Marber, attempting to show the characters’ occasional tenderness, mixing in his own reflections on sex, class and power, exhausts himself and the audience in the process.
Not that this is a complete wreck of a play, as a number of critics have implied.
Marber displays a welcome penchant for one-liners, as when John (Strindberg’s renamed servant Jean), compares, with deep satisfaction, a bourbon he has just drunk with that night’s landslide loser, Sir Winston Churchill: “Robust, hearty…and finished.”
The third character in this love triangle, another servant, Christine (Kristin in the original), comes off as stronger, in certain ways, than in the Strindberg version. Marin Ireland brings such intelligence and asperity to the role that many audience members will wonder why on earth John decided to cheat on Christine.
The hinge actor in this production is Jonny Lee Miller, who renders John as a credible mix of ambition, sexual desire, and hyper-awareness of social norms.
Sienna Miller doesn’t fare as well as her onstage colleagues. What’s the problem? Terry Teachout, the normally sound Wall Street Journal critic, wrote recently that Ms. Miller “has no more business playing a classic stage role than I have posing for the cover of Vogue. The Roundabout Theatre Company should be ashamed of itself for asking her to do so.”
Mr. Teachout has a problem with the Roundabout trading on her glamorous appeal. Other critics can't get out of their minds that a young, scandal-plagued thespian is playing a young, scandal-plagued aristocrat. But if actors’ pasts are going to be reviewed alongside their current performances, who will be left to step on a Big Apple stage?
As for Ms. Miller’s looks, they work, at least initially, to the production’s advantage. It takes an extraordinary force to induce John to risk everything for which he’s striven for years, all for the sake of a fling with an arrogant woman who makes the mistake of stooping below her station.
With the help of costume designer Michael Krass, Ms. Miller, appearing in the servants' kitchen unexpectedly to demand a dance from her dad's handsome chauffeur, freezes the action. No woman in white has created so much havoc in the male libido since Lana Turner drove John Garfield around the bend in the film The Postman Always Rings Twice. Ms. Miller should not be reproved for trying to expand her dramatic range, nor should the Roundabout be scolded for permitting her to do so.
No, I’m afraid that Marber is at fault for the holes in After Miss Julie. Strindberg had already provided so many motivations for Miss Julie’s erratic behavior that he created one of the most coveted female roles of the last century and a half.
Marber has tossed in additional unnecessary motives that make a difficult task—explaining Miss Julie’s path to self-destruction—even harder than it has to be. No, I’m afraid that this time it’s the playwright, not the blonde, who’s the dumb one in this production.
Ouch—it must have hurt the staff of the Roundabout to hear that. Patrick Marber, after all, had updated—well, okay, at least reduced the interval between then and now by half----from August Strindberg’s fierce, pathbreaking 1888 drama, to the night of the Labour Party victory in the U.K. in July 1945. And the Roundabout hadn’t just gotten anyone for the adaptation—Marber had street cred with the buzz-worthy flicks Closer and Notes on a Scandal, and the nonprofit theater company had worked with him previously on Howard Katz. What could go wrong?
If the fall theater season were baseball, then the Roundabout would be batting a healthy .333, with one hit (Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, which I’ll review soon) out of three times at bat (the three shows that I have seen, or plan to, by year's end, anyway). But Bye Bye Birdie has endured some of the most ferocious reviews for a musical that the company has ever presented, and After Miss Julie would probably be DOA by now if it had been mounted by a for-profit theater company.
The “revisal”—a revival of a classic that goes beyond a new production to offer a revised script—has become practically de rigueur with Broadway musicals, whose producers undoubtedly hope that critics will stop using the dreaded cliché “dated” (maybe that audience member I saw was a critic in sheep’s clothing?).
But a revisal of a straight play has now become quite the thing, too, with John Millington Synge and Chekhov, among others, coming in for this treatment. But guess what? It doesn’t mean the results are any better.
In a way, Marber—who wrote this originally as a 1995 BBC teleplay—has attempted to do what directors of Shakespeare have done over the centuries: i.e., prove a playwright's continuing relevance by staging his plays in every time but his own.
You can almost see the wheels turn in the minds of the Roundabout powers-that-be, still in their default Anglophile mode (Sunday in the Park With George, The Philanthropist, The 39 Steps, etc.) from the last several seasons, as they considered the new setting: Hmmm…the action takes place on a night when a conservative party, after years of trying, all-consuming war, gets turned out of office resoundingly by the electorate in favor of the progressives. It’s a new dawn! So familiar! Our Blue State, Manhattan-centric audience will have no problem connecting the dots here!
But here’s the problem—Marber and director Mark Brokaw have juiced up the action (the evidence of two characters’ intercourse becomes all too evident to a third), as well as the dialogue (one lover uses the F-word), but it’s like colorizing a classic 1940 film noir: the new tones don’t enhance the impression left but detract from it. Amazingly, they’ve sensationalized and sexed everything up, only to leave a less searing work.
They did so by disregarding one of the central dictates of Strindberg’s dramaturgy: “The joy of life is in its cruel and powerful struggles.”
In detailing the fall of the young aristocrat Miss Julie, following an impulsive, mad tryst with one of her father’s hired help, the Swedish playwright vented instincts and beliefs that more than a few people would find objectionable today: misogyny and a Darwinism as relentlessly predetermined as any credo created by John Calvin. His male servant, Jean, follows as rapid an ascent as any heat-seeking missile. Strindberg doesn’t bother to justify or sugarcoat this vision.
There’s nothing moral about any of this, any more than there’s anything remotely moral about large animals circling prey. It simply is.
In seeing how well Strindberg’s then-shocking psychological drama would translate into today’s terms, Marber & the Roundabout might have recalled the cautionary tale of Arthur Miller, who decided to adapt Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People for Broadway. So much made the play pertinent to the era of the Red Scare, Miller thought, especially the unwillingness of the townspeople to tolerate dissent. Oh, there were problems, too, with Ibsen’s version, such as the hero’s propensity to spout then-fashionable eugenics theory (very unfashionable after WWII), but Miller would take care of that.
Miller did, all right—but in the process he eliminated Ibsen’s mockery of the hero-doctor’s own naïve idealism, which made the play simultaneously entertaining and complex. The American’s Dr. Stockmann, then, became a humorless, hectoring saint that no Broadway audience wanted any part of.
Something of the same syndrome is occurring onstage at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre. Strindberg’s style is as blunt as a roundhouse blow out of nowhere that sends one to the canvass; Marber, attempting to show the characters’ occasional tenderness, mixing in his own reflections on sex, class and power, exhausts himself and the audience in the process.
Not that this is a complete wreck of a play, as a number of critics have implied.
Marber displays a welcome penchant for one-liners, as when John (Strindberg’s renamed servant Jean), compares, with deep satisfaction, a bourbon he has just drunk with that night’s landslide loser, Sir Winston Churchill: “Robust, hearty…and finished.”
The third character in this love triangle, another servant, Christine (Kristin in the original), comes off as stronger, in certain ways, than in the Strindberg version. Marin Ireland brings such intelligence and asperity to the role that many audience members will wonder why on earth John decided to cheat on Christine.
The hinge actor in this production is Jonny Lee Miller, who renders John as a credible mix of ambition, sexual desire, and hyper-awareness of social norms.
Sienna Miller doesn’t fare as well as her onstage colleagues. What’s the problem? Terry Teachout, the normally sound Wall Street Journal critic, wrote recently that Ms. Miller “has no more business playing a classic stage role than I have posing for the cover of Vogue. The Roundabout Theatre Company should be ashamed of itself for asking her to do so.”
Mr. Teachout has a problem with the Roundabout trading on her glamorous appeal. Other critics can't get out of their minds that a young, scandal-plagued thespian is playing a young, scandal-plagued aristocrat. But if actors’ pasts are going to be reviewed alongside their current performances, who will be left to step on a Big Apple stage?
As for Ms. Miller’s looks, they work, at least initially, to the production’s advantage. It takes an extraordinary force to induce John to risk everything for which he’s striven for years, all for the sake of a fling with an arrogant woman who makes the mistake of stooping below her station.
With the help of costume designer Michael Krass, Ms. Miller, appearing in the servants' kitchen unexpectedly to demand a dance from her dad's handsome chauffeur, freezes the action. No woman in white has created so much havoc in the male libido since Lana Turner drove John Garfield around the bend in the film The Postman Always Rings Twice. Ms. Miller should not be reproved for trying to expand her dramatic range, nor should the Roundabout be scolded for permitting her to do so.
No, I’m afraid that Marber is at fault for the holes in After Miss Julie. Strindberg had already provided so many motivations for Miss Julie’s erratic behavior that he created one of the most coveted female roles of the last century and a half.
Marber has tossed in additional unnecessary motives that make a difficult task—explaining Miss Julie’s path to self-destruction—even harder than it has to be. No, I’m afraid that this time it’s the playwright, not the blonde, who’s the dumb one in this production.
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