Julie is the second consecutive Icarus Theatre production where partying foreshadows tragedy. Near the start of the indie company’s DNA, performed at The Theatre Centre in November, a mass of teenagers swayed in a ravine, presaging their slide toward groupthink. Director Jordan Laffrenier’s exciting take on Julie opens with the titular character raving in the Tarragon Theatre Extraspace. Wearing Y2K-chic tinted shades and a lace-trimmed white slip dress, she stumbles through a violent contemporary dance solo under flashing nightclub lights. Unlike the kids in DNA, she’s locked in her own mind — an emotional isolation that soon fuels danger.
This 2018 drama by English playwright Polly Stenham adapts Miss Julie, with a plot in the mould of Strindberg’s original: Julie (Emily Anne Corcoran), a young aristocrat, falls for Jean (Jamar Adams-Thompson), the valet of her rich father, despite his engagement to Kristina (Tara Sky), who works as a maid in the family’s mansion. Stenham selects a contemporary urban setting, transforming Julie into a trust fund baby on her 33rd birthday. Stuck living at home, she throws a bacchanal for an offstage group of dull anonymous influencers from her social set. But she ends up ignoring them to prowl the dining room, using her birthday-princess status to seduce Jean into drinking with her until sunrise.
Stenham’s script flirts with commentary around wealth inequality and immigrant labour, but doesn’t dive deeply into either topic. It spends much of its 75-minute runtime dribbling out basic character information, which adds mystery but means the show is over just as its politics are coming into focus. With scant thematic wine to uncork, Laffrenier focuses on atmosphere, delivering a heightened production that takes more from 1990s erotic thrillers than it does from naturalistic tragedy.
“That woman is wild tonight,” remarks Jean in the play’s first spoken line — a statement echoed in the expressionistic painted backdrop of Laffrenier’s set, where lines resembling lightning and crashing waves intermingle against a swath of red, evoking Julie’s elemental level of passion. And who needs Chekhov’s gun when you’ve got a rack of 19 knives? Within these stylish boundaries, the furnishings are simple: a long black table, a couple of chairs, a bar cart.
Laffrenier’s not-quite-realistic approach means Julie’s lower-stakes scenes feel less detailed than they might. But after its first 15 minutes, the play is action-packed, and the production appears more at home.
Particularly daring is a topless sex scene that’s longer and more explicit than any I can remember on a Toronto stage in recent months (even counting Laffrenier’s autumn production of Slave Play at Canadian Stage, where he’s associate artistic director). I have no doubt the sequence is dramaturgically justified: as in classic erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction, the whole narrative orbits around a single explosive sexual encounter. Intimacy director Rebecca Lashmar syncs the throbbing movement score to an electronic musical interlude by composer Jamal Jones. Beyond keeping the choreography repeatable by providing a consistent rhythmic backdrop, these heady beats lift us off from reality, into a plane where eros sings louder than logos.
Julie manages to convince Jean that the world is their dollhouse. At first, Adams-Thompson’s body language is an essay in pragmatic professionalism — Jean wears his blazer and tie with perfectly guarded posture, often inadvertently bringing his hands together in front of his crotch when Julie comes close. But with her tendency to drape herself across the dining table, Julie prods him to open up, strip down to a T-shirt, and reveal hidden desires. Tactically pivoting from carefree laughter to a fuck-me-but-don’t-fuck-with-me glare, Corcoran’s version of the character believes she deserves more clout than she actually has, pouncing like a cheetah on any chance to exert power. Maybe she’ll play Hedda next?
The sun eventually rises on Julie and Jean’s torrid evening, and the awakening is a bath of ice water. Sky embodies this shift with a physical poise that seems foreign after the lovers’ carnage. But I never found myself wondering how the pair fell into their web of irrationality. Like us, they were simply having fun.
Julie runs at Tarragon Theatre until March 28. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. He lives in Toronto.
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