Miss Julie
August Strindberg(1888)
Extract
A man doesn't have just one form. He's like the ocean, full of currents and movement.
On Midsummer Night a count's daughter descends to the kitchen and begins a flirtation with her father's valet that by dawn will have destroyed them both. August Strindberg wrote this play in 1888, and it so scandalized Stockholm that its premiere was staged privately. The drama unfolds in real time, in one room, with the compression of a trap, as class, desire, and self-destruction braid together until no one can say where seduction ended and ruin began. Julie is proud, reckless, finally helpless; Jean is shrewd, servile, ruthless by turns. Strindberg stripped theatre to a laboratory of power, and in that kitchen distilled something permanent about what happens when desire is used as a weapon and found to have no safety.
If you loved this
Ibsen traps another aristocratic woman in the same suffocating world, and the pistol does what Julie's razor does.
Williams stages the same collision between class and desire, but Blanche gets a longer fall.
Chekhov watches the same aristocratic world collapse, but with comedy where Strindberg uses a knife.