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Miss Julie for a New Century
By Paul Lombardi
18 Oct 2009
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After Miss Julie stars Jonny Lee Miller and Marin Irelang
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| photo by Joan Marcus | A Strindberg classic from 1888 gets a makeover — Patrick Marber style — with two Millers making their Broadway debuts.
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"I've been to lots of plays where a very famous person has been cast and within 20 seconds of that person walking on stage, you forget they're a famous person," says playwright Patrick Marber. He hopes audiences will feel the same way about Sienna Miller's Broadway debut in After Miss Julie, in which one scandal-plagued sexy young thing plays another scandal-plagued sexy young thing. To some, Miller may be known more for her exploits with those pesky tabloids than for her critically acclaimed, daring turns in films like "Factory Girl."
Performances of the Roundabout Theatre Company production play the American Airlines Theatre.
It's something of a homecoming for Miller, who was born in New York but raised in the U.K. She returned to study at the Lee Strasberg Institute and got her feet wet in several Off-Broadway plays before heading back to England to make her mark in film. In a joint interview with Marber, Miller told Playbill that making her Broadway debut is "an absolute dream realized" — a dream she doesn't want spoiled by the inevitable comparisons between Miss Julie and her own tabloid outings. She concedes that she can relate to Miss Julie's predicament: "Of course, I've had my own experience of being gossiped about and scrutinized...I personally have got more depth as a result of my 20s being documented."
She is rewarded by Marber for her honesty with affectionate teasing: "You will be applauded for your bravery for sailing close to your own wind!"
Directed by Mark Brokaw, Marber's take on the August Strindberg classic Miss Julie was first staged at London's Donmar Warehouse in 2003. It transports the tale of a forbidden love and its bloody consequences from 19th-century Sweden to post–World War II England. Miller's lusty and lost heroine, the upper-class Miss Julie, falls hard for her father's valet, John, played by Jonny Lee Miller, also making his Broadway debut. Theirs is a passion that blurs all boundaries.
The play is set on the eve of the Labour Party's victory in 1945. It's a heady time of change, the beginning of the end of the British class system. Even though Marber wrote After Miss Julie years ago, just before he wrote Closer, the playwright believes his work will resonate now more than ever in America, with our own changing of the guard.
It's that change, that feeling that anything is possible, Marber says, that emboldens Miss Julie and her servant John to take that fatal plunge into each other's arms. He says his version is "much more a love story" and that Strindberg's strikes him as more a "battle of the sexes.... Mine is much more specific and possibly smaller and less elemental and, I think, in its way truer."
One harsh truth After Miss Julie brings to light is how we are sometimes cruelest to those with whom we are closest. "I'm fascinated by the pendulum this play swings on," says Miller. "They [Julie and John] are each other's mirror, and you resent that. You don't want to see yourself the way that person is looking at you, perhaps."
The play's luckiest characters escape with just a broken heart. "We kill what we love" is only one of his characters' lines, Marber says — one he doesn't think is "necessarily true," neither before nor after Miss Julie, a play that only comes close to a happy ending.
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Sienna Miller in After Miss Julie
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| photo by Joan Marcus |
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