It’s not actually an adaptation.
I don’t know how to write an adaptation.
I don’t know if it’s possible to adapt a play to a blog post. Especially not a play adapted from a play.
I also don’t really know what an adaptation is.
Julie, by Polly Stenham is actually an adaptation. I think. In writing this play, Stenham was striving to adapt the seminal, naturalistic play Miss Julie by August Strindberg. Strindberg, the acclaimed “father of Swedish Naturalism,” wrote Miss Julie in 1888 in Swedish. In Strindberg’s play, a story of love, sex, power, gender and class unfolds in real time onstage (and offstage) through symbolic Naturalism as Julie grapples with choices about her life in a patriarchal world and Jean uses sex and manipulation to gain personal power in a classist world.
Polly Stenham’s play is not that at all. Except that it is a little. While the general structure of the play mirrors its 130-year-old twin, Julie attempts to explore very different themes and questions. Where Strindberg interrogates class divisions, Stenham set out (and arguably failed) to illustrate issues of race and immigration in relation to economic disparity and dependency. This staging places all of the offstage sexual events center stage for a PG audience, asking the audience to believe in a consummation that they witnessed not happening. Stenham expanded the empty role of the absent father into central character motivation rather than merely circumstantial opportunity, and expanded the third character present – the other domestic worker Kristin – into a consequence and an obstacle rather than fodder for character exposition. These two characters, both rather negligible in Strindberg’s play, have groundbreaking implications for the other two characters. If, to an actor, a character is only action, motivation/objective, and obstacle, then the expansion of Kristin and the father rendered both Julie and Jean unrecognizable characters.
The main difference between these two plays, however, is the central exploration of power. In Strindberg’s play, Jean uses sex to gain power over Julie and therefore over his class-based oppressor. He demonstrates this power by decapitating Julie beloved pet bird right in front of her and coaxing her into her ultimate suicide. This is a play about power between one man and one woman. In Stenham’s play, however Jean never gains power over Julie (who instead seems to be constantly under the influence of alcohol, narcotics, and cocaine). In this play, Julie kills both her own bird and herself, without any suggestion or manipulation from Jean. This is not a play about power. It is a play about sex and trauma. It is trying to be a play about race, class, immigration, and economic frivolity. It is not a play about interpersonal power and it is not trying to be.
Is this an adaptation? Stenham’s play struggles with very different questions from Strindberg’s and poses very different themes and characters and circumstances. It has the same structural make up and the same ultimate act of tragedy (and the same names), but this is an all-together different play. Does that make it an adaptation? I’m not sure. I don’t really know what an adaptation is.
Someone once said (many someones, many onces) that there are only 12 stories in the whole world. Does that mean that every play, every book, every song, every poem is an adaptation? Is all storytelling adaptation? Are all plays just adaptations of life? That’s the point of Strindberg’s beloved Naturalism, is it not? To hold a mirror up to life and adapt it.
