Stage: After Miss Julie

American Airlines Theater

New York

(212) 719-1300

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It’s easy to see why Patrick Marber was attracted to August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. A playwright who trades in muscular dialogue and erotically charged power plays between the sexes (see Closer), Marber must have been giddy at the prospect of sexually supercharging Strindberg’s tragedy about lust and class division. But while he succeeds at revving up the sexual tensions between Strindberg’s hot and haughty rich girl, Julie, and John, her father’s chauffeur, Marber’s decision to update the play’s setting to postwar Britain “doesn’t really add much substance” to the original work. Broadway audiences are more likely to flock to director Mark Brokaw’s production, however, for British film actress Sienna Miller, making her Broadway debut in the title role.

“Let me just say up front that I was rooting for Sienna Miller” going into this show, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. And as much as I’d like to say that the actress “entered stage right a mere movie mini-star but exited a goddess of the the-a-tuh”—alas, she does not. Blessed with striking good looks and a decent amount of acting talent, Miller registers on stage as a “healthy, sane young woman with good diction, good posture, and great legs.” All fine qualities, but none come in handy when playing a “tautly wound, death-courting neurotic” such as Julie. Properly portrayed, Julie should make the likes of Hedda Gabler and Lady Macbeth seem angelically serene. Miller is merely bland.

Sienna Miller certainly seems “out of her depth” as Strindberg’s wayward ­aristocrat, said David Rooney in Variety. But another Miller in this production is fully up to the challenges presented by this demanding play. As John, the chauffeur and former soldier whom Julie battles and then beds, Jonny Lee Miller all but steals the show, skillfully navigating the character’s quick turns between dutiful subservience to his employer’s daughter and a “cocky insubordination” fueled by her advances. Yet both the adaptation and the production are so flawed that neither performance really matters all that much. Between Marber’s misguided handling of Strindberg’s themes and Brokaw’s “melodramatic” direction, After Miss Julie ends up as just another “mauling” of a Scandinavian classic.