After Miss Julie

Christopher Morris and Claire Armstrong in After Miss Julie.

Red One Theatre Collective’s excellent production of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie is now playing at the Storefront Theatre. An adaptation of Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888), After Miss Julie follows a series of sordid happenings at an English country estate on the evening of the British Labour Party’s landslide election victory in 1945.

To give a sense of the territory, Marber’s most famous play is Closer; a year before writing Miss Julie, Strindberg penned an essay entitled “On Psychic Murder.” Indeed, the intensely fraught dynamic that propels the play, an electric battle of wills between Julie (Claire Armstrong), the estate master’s daughter, and her father’s valet John (Christopher Morris), exists somewhere beyond love and hate—in the realm of sex, power and exploitation. Marber’s brilliant, psychologically complex script masterfully transposes the original play’s Victorian themes of class envy, sadomasochism, and the forbidden onto the moment when the British Establishment, embodied by Winston Churchill, was both literally and symbolically ousted. This backdrop sets a tone of displacement, embattlement and confusion that immerses Julie, John and the play’s only other character, the stalwart maid Christine (Amy Keating), John’s sometime fiance.

A sense of flux and the unhinged is established from the beginning, as all three characters haphazardly enter the room to an ambient musical pastiche. The sparse set is evocative of the era (think Upstairs Downstairs), assisted by well-chosen period music and costumes. There is no stage, and audience members voyeuristically peer down at the room.

The cast delivers outstanding performances across the board, keeping audience members on the edge of their seats (my neighbour gasped more than once), while also providing some much-needed laughs. Armstrong is radiant as Julie, in a role that could be described as Scarlett O’Hara with a twist: the coquettish debutante with a will of steel, plus some fetishes Margaret Mitchell never got around to mentioning. Morris is pitch-perfect as John—canny and unpredictable with a misogynistic streak, while Keating’s understated portrayal of long-suffering Christine makes you want to invite her over for dinner. The play reaches a riveting climax with an ego-annihilating war of words between Julie and John, in which the power dynamic shoots back and forth like quicksilver. It’s quite a sight to behold. It will not end well.

After Miss Julie is playing at the Storefront Theatre until November 30. Visit redonetheatrecollective.com for more information and to buy tickets.