By Uday Duggal

It seems impossible to hear of ‘Mies Julie’ without being informed that the show is rather warm, and possibly moist.

‘Sultry’, ‘sizzling’, and, ‘steamy’ are the recurring descriptors that cling to this modern reworking of August Strindberg’s 1888 play, now set in a South African kitchen rather than the original Sweden. Playwright/director Yaël Farber’s adaptation, baring more than enough skin to merit its R18 tag, does justify their repeated usage.

From the earliest moments of the play, the air is rife with sexual expectancy. When we first see the titular Julie, played with both suppleness and steel by Hilda Cronje, her skin is glistening with sweat; her eyes are narrowed, as she surveys the room with a hunger that seems palpably carnal. Her gaze steadies on John, a black farmhand working on her Boer father’s land, and from there the sexual anticipation builds and builds, culminating in a heaving, mad frenzy of desire.

But there is far more to this play than the sex, far more that deserves to be remembered and talked about.

As Yaël Farber puts it: “Sexual relations across the colour line… I don’t believe that is the compelling point of a Miss Julie in contemporary South Africa. Land issues, ownership, power, sexuality, mothers, memories. These are what remain as shrapnel from our history.” And this shrapnel is what rises to meet the audience, brought to the fore by the kitchen’s passion and heat. John (played by Bongile Mantsai) and Julie, white master and black servant, are thrust into a doomed relationship. It is a bleak, insider’s look at the realities of post-Apartheid South Africa, completely shorn of any residual optimism from Nelson Mandela’s triumph two decades before. “Welcome to the new South Africa,” John bitterly proclaims, “where miracles leave us exactly as we began.”

Indeed, there has been change on the exterior of things, but it is insufficient and inadequate. At the outset of the play we learn that workers on the farm are celebrating Freedom day, the anniversary of South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections. Inside the kitchen, metres away from the festivities, Julie innocently inquires of John, as he is shining Julie’s father’s boots: “Do you feel free?” When he reluctantly replies in the affirmative, she grins and pounces: “Kiss my foot.” It is an order, one John cannot refuse to carry out.

And it is a telling episode. Clearly, in spite of moments where Julie and John reveal an earnest affection for each other, they remain unable to truly shed their skins, to break free from roles they were made to assume from and by birth. They are chained to what was, unable to escape the legacy of years of hate and subjugation.

But [quip float="pqleft"]the true of power of Mies Julie comes from how certain truths ring true not just in a South African context, but for any society that grapples with issues of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, identity. [/quip]Perhaps here in Singapore we pay less overt attention to our own miracle, for it is ongoing, expected, ordinary. And yet is it not at least somewhat miraculous, the coexistence in such a small space, in relative accord, of our different cultures? From troubled beginnings something improbable was achieved.

But while we are not quite ‘exactly as we began’, Mies Julie highlights the possibility, even the probability, of tensions tempting an otherwise sound mind to dichotomise, to slip into the flawed logic of ‘us’ and ‘them’, to begin viewing differences with suspicion. Just as peeling away the surface, post-apartheid ideals of equality reveals an ugliness that remains in the play’s South Africa, peering more closely at ourselves we catch murmurings, encounter disagreements over curry, Facebook rants about void deck weddings, ever louder grumbling about foreigners.

"Mies Julie offers not a clear solution but a clear-eyed, if somewhat bleak, assessment of the way things are".

It is with that last point that Mies Julie perhaps holds the most incisive questions for a country of immigrants that doesn’t seem to want many more. How do we claim the right to the land that we call ours with such certainty? How did we obtain it, or assume the sole right to inherit and inhabit it? There were, of course, the indignant and indigenous even before we, immigrants all, assumed that mantle.

Yaël Farber offers a hint to make sense of this: “It is through the arts that we can come to terms with our past- and envisage our future". Mies Julie offers not a clear solution but a clear-eyed, if somewhat bleak, assessment of the way things (elsewhere, and yet here) are.

It is with this clarity in the present that we might begin to know can be done differently; what can be done now, so we still have stories of the past that we are proud to tell in the future.

Photos from Singapore Repertory Theatre

If you like what you read, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get the latest updates.