About the Play:

Miss Julie has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Female/Male Scenes.

Miss Julie is a full-length drama by David French adapted from the 1888 play by Swedish playwright August Strindberg. a story of class and sexual struggle that remains a masterpiece of naturalistic theater. Still shocking audiences more than 120 years after its debut, Miss Julie puts class and gender on a collision course with changing moralities. Many actors love performing Strindberg's work, and this is by far his best one. This adaptation by David French, serves to reveal the true power and pull of class distinctions.

Miss Julie is a disturbing and enduring drama of the transgressive affair between the daughter of a Count and the Count's man-servant. It is set on Midsummer's Eve on the estate of a Count in Sweden. When blue-blooded Miss Julie steps down to seduce blue-collared Jean, her father's valet, the two engage in a cat-and-mouse game of lust, ambition, and control. As their affair unfolds, their true motives are revealed, with grave consequences. Will the impassioned pair be able to break the boundaries of status, or will they remain victims to the stronghold of tradition? A clever social critique for the ages, August Strindberg's Miss Julie, in this adaptation by highly-acclaimed playwright and translator David 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.

Miss Julie premiered at Strindberg's experimental theatre in Denmark in 1889 was banned by the censor and its first public production three years later in Berlin aroused such protests that it was withdrawn after one performance. Miss Julie has since become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is one of Strindberg's most popular and frequently performed plays. This adaptation by David French premiered in 2006 at The Bauer Theatre in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. The U.S. premiere was by Cincinnati Shakespeare Company in 2010.

Cast: 2 female, 1 male

What people say:

"Miss Julie seems more like a … Sam Shepard play than something from the late 19th century … Direct, accessible and strangely contemporary, [David French's adaptation of] Miss Julie is a … blast of dramatic fresh air which retains its provocative power." — Halifax Chronicle Herald

"When it comes to playwriting, David French is perhaps the most tormentedly punctilious, and the most celebrated in English Canada." — Globe and Mail

About the Playwright:

Johan August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a renowned Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, his career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics.

About the Translator:

David French (1939-2010) was one of Canada's most popular and critically-acclaimed playwrights. He is best remembered for the semi-autobiographical Mercer plays, such as Leaving Home, which chronicle the lives of a Newfoundland family with humour and pathos. The Mercer plays have received hundreds of productions across North America, including a Broadway production of Of the Fields, Lately. This quintet of plays has also touched audiences in Europe, South America and Australia. His backstage comedy Jitters has been performed all over the continent, and most of his plays have had successful international runs, including two Broadway productions. In 1989, David French was inducted into the Newfoundland Arts Hall of Honour, and in 2001 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.