BWW Reviews: South Africa's MIES JULIE Thunders Into Shakespeare Theatre

Into Shakespeare Theatre's stately Lansburgh Theatre comes a performance so powerful, so unrestrained, so visceral as to rip the bloody roots of power from the earth and hold them dripping above our astonished heads.

Re-imaged and reborn by internationally renowned writer and director Yael Farber and presented by the Baxter Theatre Centre at the University of Cape Town (in association with the South African State Theatre), MIES JULIE takes August Strindberg's century-old probe into the dynamics of power and servitude and sexual longing and recasts it on the parched expanse of post-apartheid South Africa.

This MIES JULIE is sound and fury signifying everything. "Pain is the truth, everything else is subject to doubt," wrote South African Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee. In Farber's MIES JULIE, pain is the mother tongue, and what Coetzee calls South Africa's "deformed and stunted relations between human beings" is the currency of this gut-wrenching tragedy.

Significantly, Strindberg's MISS JULIE is set in 19th century Sweden, in a country that, a hundred years hence, would become one of the most equitable societies on the planet. MIES JULIE, conversely, is set in the hard scrapple outback of South Africa, 15 years after the fall of apartheid, where the promise of truth and reconciliation lies waiting, waiting in a squatters' camp beyond the trees.

The story, in brief, is this: A twentyish Mies Julie, the only child of a widowed Boer/Afrikaner landowning farmer in a remote region of South Africa has just been jilted by the fiancé of her father's arranging. Her father is away, and she haunts the kitchen where her nursemaid, Christine, scrubs again the floor she has scrubbed a thousand times, until---in a detail of breathtaking symbolism---Christine has worn off her very fingerprints, the very identity through which she could redeem her right to vote in the new South Africa. Christine's son, John, comes in from his work on The Farm, on which an increasingly resentful colony of black South African squatters now reside. The post-apartheid laws have authorized the squatters the right of return to their ancestral land, but not the right to farm it.

Julie's mother, we soon learn, despondent after childbirth and tormented by the desolation of The Farm, committed suicide shortly after Julie's birtH. Christine scrubbed the blood of her suicide from the walls, and raised Mies Julie, embracing her with a tenderness never shown her own son, John.

John and Julie have known each other, and mutually longed for each other, since they were children. On this sweltering night with her father away, Julie prowls the kitchen with a sexual hunger for John that inhabits the space like the spirits of the ancestors. Over and over again, John resists Julie's brazen seductions with the resoluteness of a man whose life depends upon it, as indeed it does. He resists, that is, until the momentum of this sexual magnetism, this collision of power and servitude, race and possession can no longer be contained. What follows is a fierce and furious maelstrom of impossible contradictions, of lust and loathing, hope and despair.

This is a play, a production, an experience almost impossible to imagine being created locally today. It is too ancient, too rooted in the blood soaked earth of centuries of struggle and oppression, whose sorrows are too raw, too naked, too ever-present for the gentile confines of this nation's capital.

As Mies Julie, Hilda Conje radiates a ferocious fever of sexual heat and despair. Her Julie is a coiled serpent of dance and desire. She moves across the stage with stealthy grace, leaping over and over again into the night air with predatory resolve. She wears her privilege like a second skin---it both defines her and defiles her, and for the next 90 minutes we watch her writhe in an irreconcilable struggle to birth a new reality for her, for John, for the wounded land that is South Africa. Conje's performance electrifies, with its alternating currents of cruelty and collapse, and by play's end her tragedy overwhelms us as smoke hovers over the stage like breath.

As John, Bongile Mantsai astounds. His John is Promethean, condemned to eternal torment, bound to the rock of his conquered people and fed upon by the eagle of dispossession. Until as a man, he can no longer endure such violation and he explodes, Prometheus unbound. Mantsai's performance is of such power, such restraint, such searing intelligence and grace that it takes our collective breath away. He commands the stage with the invisible authority of wind, moving across it with the strength and fluidity of a parkour traceur. Washington audiences, I daresay, have never seen passion onstage as fierce and turbulent as Cronje and Mantsai's Julie and John, and we cannot look away.

And through it all, there is Thoko Ntshinga's Christine, John's mother, Julie's nursemaid, her family's cook and housekeeper whose endless labor sustains them all, as it has sustained civilizations for all time. Farber has wisely re-imaged Strindberg's Christine, not as a rival for John's affections, but as his mother and the surrogate who mothered Julie.

Ntshinga's Christine speaks for the great legions of servant women across the globe who must raise the children of their masters, bake their bread and scrub the blood from their floors. Ntshinga imbues Christine with a strength and resolve and resonant pain almost unbearable to witness. She is burdened with the laments of the ancestors, buried beneath the floor of the master's house. The ancestors call to her to honor them, and she has tried to do so, ripping open the master's floor, enraging him, and indenturing her son's wages for months to come. Ntshinga's Christine is an anguished study in a relentless journey of endurance, and it is she who remains stooped and toiling at the play's end.

Within this stark landscape passes the Ancestor, Singer, and Musician Tandiwe Nofirst Lungisa. It is she, her voice deep and guttural, who speaks for the land, for the bones of the dead, for the urgency of resolution and reverence. The ground on which this MIES JULIE treads is layered with history, the land speaks, and in Lungisa's remarkable presence, the air reverberates.

Writer and director Yael Farber and her astonishing company have created arguably the most powerful work of theatre Washington audiences have seen/will see in years, decades even. The petty revenges of our comfortable lives vanish in the gravity and pain that roots this MIES JULIE. "There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice," wrote South Africa's Nadine Gordimer, and watching MIES JULIE we are chastened by our own nation's legacies of displacement, sanitized though they now be by the capriciousness of real estate. Here, now, land is claimed more surreptitiously, not by slaughter but by quiet edict. Highways slice communities in two and the bonds of kinship shrivel; the stadium, the convention center, the artist lofts, all seize the land and in a twinkling all that was before is gone, replaced by sparkling high rises and trendy restaurants. The money flows, town coffers fill, and all is gladness at City Hall.

The legacies of class and race, displacement and subjugation live on, however, and, as Farber's MIES JULIE reveals, they ravage us all.

The design team for Farber's MIES JULIE has textured the production in the hard realities of this world and the beyond. Set and lighting designer Patrick Curtis has created a Spartan representation of the landowner's kitchen, a bare room with weathered chairs and table, a dilapidated stove and, in the background, rows of the master's boots which John must shine. Filled with wafting smoke, the austerity of the setting conveys immediately the hard scrapple life of The Farm; one can well imagine the deprivation of the workers if the master's house is so barren. The lighting design (original lighting design by Paul Abrams) evokes the desolation of place, the ominous night and the inhabiting of the land by the generations who came before. Costume designer Birrie le Roux perfectly conveys the nature and station of each character, from Julie's scant, flowing skirt to John's worn coveralls and Christine's layered skirts and aprons and crisp Sunday best, a stark contrast to the dreary clothing of work. Music composed and performed by Daniel and Matthew Pencer creates a resonant, nuanced and ethereal soundscape; a synthesizer brings forth foreboding tones, a saxophone moans like the spirits.

Finally, a personal note: for eight years my husband and children and I shared our home with Mphela Makgoba, a dissident South African poet and actor exiled in the US for 31 years before returning to his homeland in 1995. Like most South Africans, he spoke multiple languages, including the Xhosa uttered between Christine and John. In this production, again I heard the voice of our friend, his thunderous poetry of dissent, his narrative of privation and resistance, the thousand hours of discourse on the nature of oppression, of empire, of "the boot on the neck" of the South African people and their brethren worldwide. "How long?" asked Makgoba's best known poem. "Streams of tears fill the Zambezi; even crocodiles have learned to weep. How long?"

How long indeed.

90 minutes without intermission

Advisories: Nudity, explicit sexual content, and violence
Shakespeare Theatre's Lansburgh Theatre, 450 7th St., NW, WDC
Through November 24, 2013
Tickets: 202-547-1122 or ShakespeareTheatre.org
Photographs by Rodger Bosch or Murdo MacLeod

To post a comment, you must register and login.