What is it about Miss Julie that makes directors so keen to rebuild the fourth wall when staging it? In Katie Mitchell’s deconstruction for the Berlin Schaubühne in 2010, Strindberg’s events could only reliably be watched over a video link; now Frédéric Fisbach’s version, first seen at last year’s Avignon Festival, places things behind a glass wall, sometimes two. Surprisingly, Fisbach maintains (in a programme-essay dialogue with himself) that what he is doing is opening up the play. Whilst it is true that he completes the picture by putting a (locally cast) chorus upstage as the servants of Julie’s father’s household, revelling away on Midsummer Eve, and also that the glass is gradually pushed aside, I found it immensely irksome and anti-theatrical to be watching the crucial section of Julie and Jean’s mutual seduction through two layers of obstruction, or three if you count the dancers. Even when the principals are finally and unambiguously in the same space as the audience, their voices remain partially miked up (slightly too tinnily in the case of Bénédicte Cerutti’s Kristin), militating against the intimacy which was one of Strindberg’s major dramatic aims. Nor are matters helped by the insertion of several moderately lengthy blackouts; just because the play cannot logically unfold in real time, that is no reason not to stage the action as continuously as written.
    
Where Fisbach scores is in the personal dynamic between the central duo, as the power ebbs and flows between them. At various moments, even unexpectedly late in the 100-minute play, there are relaxed, bantering episodes rather than the more usual sense that every single line has portent. When Jean urges Julie to go off to a new life with him, she begins her preparations by putting her knickers back on beneath her golden sequinned dress; Jean himself favours a leather jacket. And Juliette Binoche and Nicolas Bouchaud are, of course, talented actors, the pair of them. I must confess, however, that although I can usually be sex- and colour-blind when watching a play, I often have problems with age, and a 46-year-old actor playing Jean (who refers to himself as a young man) opposite a Miss Julie two years his senior but playing a wild-child sorely taxed my suspension of disbelief.
     
Written for the Financial Times.