Adapted by Tara Beagan from August Strindberg’s original play. Directed
by Melee Hutton. Featuring Darrell Dennis, Christine Horne and Gail
Maurice. Presented by KICK Theatre. To Nov 29. Tue-Sat 8pm; Sun 2:30pm.
$20; Sun PWYC. The Theatre Centre, 1087 Queen W.
416-538-0988.
www.ticketweb.ca.
Theatre is a sort of balancing act. It requires a very delicate but determined application of a variety of forces in order to achieve a dynamic result. KICK Theatre’s inaugural production, Miss Julie: Sheh’mah, has determination aplenty but lacks some of that delicacy, which throws off its equilibrium and ultimately affects its impact.
Play(re-)wright Beagan’s adaptation of the 1888 Swedish classic relocates it away from Europe, in the interior of British Columbia in the 1920s. It is recast with Native Canadian servants and reworded with more modern English than is found in most translations.
The first parts of this revision work. The shift to a Canadian context seems neither forced nor flagrant, and the main thrust of Strindberg’s story, of a young woman’s love affair with her social inferior, is well-pasted onto the pre-existing class issues involving Canada’s First Nations — Sheh’mah is a Ntlakapamux word meaning “white person.” The shift in time, however, and especially the shift in language, functions less cleanly. The temporal location feels necessary but it is not nurtured, and the speech patterns swing almost haphazardly about, often sounding extremely contemporary and thus in discord with the production’s look and locale.
Director Hutton employs the stillness of the stage well, causing the small, wood-lined house surrounded by the soothing backdrop of the West Coast Mountains to play host to the bloody and bawdy events inserted onstage in this new version. These horrific and hormone-fuelled actions, however, inject a rawness into the piece that, while effective in their awfulness, are perhaps too intense to have much more than shock value.
The acting efforts also seem out of sync and most of the interactions between the players highlight the existing tensions, but expose little of the tenderness that should flesh out the complicated nature of their relationships. Horne’s Julie is somewhat stronger (and drunker) than is typical, and she plays the role with a determined detachment rather than just a naïve neediness. But beside Dennis’ bumbling yet brutal Jonny (who does not seem fully engaged until near the end), they seem at odds — not as characters but as actors playing against each other. Add to this a series of overly long pauses and you get pacing, which is so key to this story, that drags when it really needs to drive.