13 Relocating Strindberg’s Miss Julie: Yaël Faber’s South African adaptation. Xanthe Baylis This essay was a response to the question: “Dramatists and theatre-makers frequently adapt modernist plays by relocating them into the present or the recent past and changing the geographical or cultural setting. Discuss the artistic merit and possible drawback of this approach with reference to examples of your choice.” Contemporary adaptations of modernist drama are often described in reductive terms as attempts to “update” previous works for new audiences. Such a framing underestimates the extent to which adaptation can fundamentally reconfigure not only setting and temporal structure but the very philosophical nature of the original text. As adaptation theory suggests, reworkings are not secondary or derivative but constitute independent works that enter into a dynamic dialogue with their source material, transforming meaning rather than preserving it. This is particularly evident in Yaël Faber’s Mies Julie, which relocates August Strindberg’s Miss Julie to post-apartheid South Africa. Here, the shift is not merely one of setting or temporal framework; it entails a profound reimagining of time itself. In this essay I will argue that the significance of this adaptation lies in two interrelated ways. First, Farber generates new meaning by relocating Strindberg’s narrative within a historical and temporal framework in which the past persists as an active force shaping the present. Second, the adaptation demonstrates the generative potential of theatre; it does not simply reproduce the text, but transforms it into an independent, self- aware work in which the textual and historical legacies coexist, collide and are experienced viscerally through performance. These two aspects, contextual and temporal relocation and creative generativity, are however in productive tension, highlighting both the political and aesthetic stakes of contemporary adaptation. By examining how Mies Julie negotiates history, temporality and embodied performance, this essay will show that the play operates as a palimpsest of self-conscious reworking in which pasts, both historical and textual, persist as haunting presences within the theatrical present. A key way in which Mies Julie reconfigures Strindberg’s narrative is through its treatment of historical context, particularly the persistence of the past within the present. Drawing on postcolonial understandings of history as ongoing, unresolved, and significantly inscribed in both land and body, Mies Julie relocates the narrative to post-apartheid South Africa, where the legacy of apartheid continues to structure social relations. This is embodied most clearly in the reconfiguration of the central character. Julie becomes a white Afrikaner woman, while John is a black South African Xhosa farm labourer whose family’s historical
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