Reconciliation seems a distant dream play as Strindberg’s relocated classic reopens old wounds.

Octagon Theatre, Perth

February 14, 2014

“You think my womb is your land-grab?” screams a white woman to the black man with whom she’s just spent her virgin night. If she carries his child, that might be his one and only way of reclaiming his ancestral home, taken generations back by her father’s family. As an isolated incident it may seem a far cry from Miss Julie, August Strindberg’s 19th-century play of repressed sexuality and class warfare, but apart from the added issue of colonialism, Mies Julie, Yaël Farber’s startling contemporary update is true to its roots and the best, most searing version of the play that I can recall.

Farber’s startling production comes to the Perth Festival trailing a string of five-star reviews garnered since its Baxter Theatre Company premiere in Cape Town back in 2012, but this electric shock of a staging is more than capable of standing behind every one of them. The focus on the land issue and right of title lies at the heart of the director’s vision. It’s the festering sore that lies beneath the veneer of reconciliation in modern day South Africa. Locating the play in a bleak farmhouse on remote Cape Karoo, on the night of the annual Freedom Day celebrations, a superb cast of three pick at the scabs and explore the painful reality of what can and cannot be recovered, whether it be land, dignity or the dead.

The figure we see at first emerging from the swirling mists is Tandiwe Lungisa, a musician and singer who carries such authenticity in her bearing, weighed down by years of toil, and so much lamentation in her earthy voice, that we are transported effortlessly to this remote homestead. She is the ancestral ghost that is seen only by Christine, the dispossessed granddaughter of native Africans, and here literally buried in the ground beneath the kitchen floor. These days she is merely the hired help for the family that took their land.

Played by the remarkable Thoko Ntshinga, Christine is proud, resilient and broken, all at the same time – her fingerprints literally worn away with work. With her son, John, she looks after “Mies Julie” and her father, too tired to think much beyond her daily chores and church on Sunday. By exploiting Christine’s maternal bond, rather than the character’s usual ill-defined status as John’s fiancé, Farber adds another rich ingredient to her emotional stew.

As a warmer, more sympathetic John than the bullying Jeans of traditional productions, Bongile Mantsai is a revelation. A handsome, toned young man with a dancer’s grace, he exudes an effortless sexuality and a crackling energy combined with an attractive naivety rare to find in this role. His tragic transformation from farm boy to cynical polemicist is compelling to watch.

His “Mies Julie” is the equally compelling Hilda Cronje, like Julies before her a complex mix of the pitiable and the repellent, but with the added repugnance here of a layer of inbred racial arrogance. “Now kiss my foot,” she demands like a child in the playground. “Fucking do it!” she adds, sparking with a dangerous sexual energy. Proud and laden with class contradictions, she holds the damage done her by her mother’s rejection and suicide deep inside.

The brutality of the language Farber’s excellent adaptation puts in the mouths of her characters reflects the brutality of their childhoods, brought up in the shit and piss of the farmyard. For John, taught to be respectful of his place by his mother, it takes all of Julie’s drunken tormenting to bring him to the realisation that in 20 years of emancipation, nothing has changed. “Welcome to the new South Africa, Mies Julie,” he spits at her. She calls him “kaffir”, he calls her “bitch”. It’s a devastating indictment of the fragility of the status quo.

When the sex comes, it’s graphic, violent and disturbing. The dénouement is even worse. Whether this is meant to represent an extreme one off or simply to reveal what lies buried beneath every white man’s claim to African land, it’s a desperately bleak picture. Catching up with the actors after the show they recognised a parallel with Australian cultural and political issues but were appalled at how few Indigenous faces they had seen in Perth – certainly none in their audiences. “Where are all the black people here,” Ntshinga said to me, her voice bristling with outrage. Her younger colleagues, children of the new politicised South Africa agreed. After the draining emotional catharsis of the play, the fact that these actors still had more to give might just be the greatest tribute of all.