Drama Cwk Miss Julie

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        Strindberg’s Miss Julie is a play that was written far ahead of it’s time and has the substance to entertain and question the views of audiences to this day. It explores the themes of class differences and the place of women in society. We decided to explore this play after much deliberation as we felt that it not only has the capability to challenge us as actors but that it is still relevant to modern society.

        Miss Julie is set in the kitchen of a Count’s estate and tells of the lust between the Count’s daughter, Julie, and the Count’s manservant, Jean. Throughout the play the stories of both Jean and Julie’s childhood's are recounted and their longing for a different social status is expressed.

        To begin our exploration we chose a series of scenes which we felt to be particularly important and created still images to accompany them. Samiha, Layla, Peter and I created a still image of the first scene in the play where Jean describes the way Miss Julie danced with him to Christine. I felt that although this was an important scene as it was the opening to the play there was not enough visual content to create an effective still image so I decided that it would be best to show not only the Jean describing it but what was being described. Samiha role playing Christine, and I, Jean, stood on a block to show that we were what was real and looked down on the scene of Peter, Jean, and Layla, Julie, which would have been part of my memory. Samiha and I used text from the script to formulate our thought tracks which not only portrayed what was going through our minds but served as very good narration to the scene taking place below us. I felt that this was an effective piece drama but there was quite a bit of confusion when transitioning from one still image to another which could have been eliminated by communicating more efficiently.

        Alia and Hussein were the next group to perform. They performed a scene described in the play where Julie is “training” her fiancé. She is in fact whipping him like a dog. This description provided one of the first insights into Julie’s personality.  Hussein playing the fiancé knelt down on a block while Alia stood and whipped him while Hannah provided the scripted narration. Alia and Hussein created a stop-motion animation with their still images where they would go through the still images freezing for only a second between each one. Their first attempt was a little sloppy due to a lack of co-ordination between them however once they established a rhythm the effect was staggering. The single second between image was all that was needed to analyse the scene and the pauses provided a different feel to conventional movement. One outstanding element throughout the scene was the glint in Alia’s eye which I felt was the perfect insight into Miss Julie’s character and the madness surrounding her.

        Omar, Hannah and Maryam were the third group to perform, they did a piece on rank which showed the way power went from Miss Julie to Jean throughout the play. They created a makeshift staircase and in each consecutive still image Jean played by Omar moved up while Julie, Hannah, moved down. Maryam provided the narration. The technique was very effective and we used it during the development phase. I felt, however, that this scene could have been a lot more effective had it been explored later on in our exploration due to the increased insight we would have had into the way rank appears to change throughout the play. I also felt that still images, due to no fault of the actors, were not able to do this subject justice.

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        We then reorganised the groups and created a second set of still images. Alia and I looked at two relatively simple scenes to perform, one where Jean is forced to kiss Julie’s shoe and the descriptions of both dreams. These scenes were developed on in the development phase so we took them at face value during the response phase.

        Omar and Maryam created the next still image which depicted the relationship between Jean played by Omar and the Count who was represented by a pair of boots. The boots were placed on a pedestal out of Omar’s reach. Maryam read ...

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