"Julie". Pilch. Review by Anuj Mishra

A couple of weeks ago, I received an invitation to Julie’s birthday party in my pidge. The obvious question flashed in my mind – do I know a Julie? – before I realised it was a flyer for what looked like a club night. In fact, Polly Stenham’s Julie is a play, and an immersive one at that.

The play begins curtain-up with an ensemble of girls dancing to 'Heads will Roll', among other bangers. The stage is set with a DJ booth which doubles as lighting and sound, and a central stage which doubles as a dancefloor, much like the cheese floor of years gone by. This fifteen minute long pre-opening leaves us to gaze upon the ensemble’s interactions with one another, while they tried to make us join in with the fun.

But as soon as Julie formally begins, this immersive club setting is stripped away to reveal a thoroughly domestic drama set in the final hour of a houseparty. The play, a modern adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, begins with an intoxicated Julie (Catherine Claire) stumbling into a room where her companion, Kristina (Hafeja Khanam), is busy cleaning up. Julie chats with Kristina as if she were an old friend when Kristina’s fiance, Jean (Rufus Shutter) enters the room. All the while, the bass-heavy dance music (by Ice Dob) rages on in the room next door, momentarily swelling as characters open and close doors. The garbled dynamics of this scenario, with Kristina and Jean apparently straddling friendship and servitude, are only clarified a while later, when Jean finally spells it out for us – Kristina is the maid, and Jean the chauffeur.

The play continues as a three-hander in which Julie manipulates, patronises, and becomes victim to her staff, all the while unleashing outright cruelty towards them both. Catherine Claire performed with flair, playing out the character – hypocrisy and all – with solid naturalism. Towards the end of the play, after Julie has played the cruel mistress and blind lover, she transforms herself into an object of sheer pathos when Jean tells her that her father has come home: “Is he angry with me?”, she asks, as if a petulant child.

As Jean, Rufus Shutter’s performance encompassed his character’s blurred lines well. Here he exudes a swagger that can command a theatre, while there he is pathetic and whimpering as he confesses his years-long yearning for Julie. As Kristina, Hafeja Khanam lent passion to the role, showing real strength in her final confrontation with Julie and delivering the black comedy of the play’s closing moments well. A clever product of direction (Rosie Morgan-Males) and set design placed several prop pieces underneath the stage and raised seating areas, forcing Kristina to literally prostrate herself before audience members (and Julie) as she cleaned up after the party.

As is probably evident from my brief summary of its plot, the play loads up on class commentary. While the immersive nature of the play’s opening is barely carried through, its approximation of audience members with the nameless partygoers implicitly makes a comment about our own place in the class dynamics that the play puts on show.

Julie spins off a bouquet of familiar tropes – the subversive romance of a servant and their master, and the mutual jealousy that governs both parties in this dyad – but it nonetheless felt fresh. The play’s experimentalism added to a cleverly thought through production, making for an exciting piece of theatre.

Julie continues its run at the Michael Pilch Studio until 1^st March. Runtime of 1hr 30mins.