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Staging August Strindberg’s Miss Julie against the backdrop of Schloss Neuhardenberg a century after the play was written must be understood as much more than just reminiscence about a theatre piece that tells the story of the scandalous love of a count’s daughter for her father’s valet.

Individual themes such as Strindberg’s radical social Darwinism or his bitter battle against the emancipation of women, which once made the play such a scandal, have been revised or made relative in the course of history and should not be summoned up again. Armin Holz’ production is aimed more at illuminating Strindberg’s themes, lurking between dance macabre and trance, which speak of the yearnings and cravings of two people to transcend moral strictures and class divisions and embrace their love.

The naturalistic tragedy becomes a drama of seduction between man and woman and the resulting fears of completely abandoning themselves to it, thereby giving up their own lives for love. Experimentation with that kind of love is accomplished with an interplay of desire, passion, self-abandon, denial, failure and betrayal.

Julie
I don’t have the courage to let myself fall. I have a dream <...> I am sitting on the top of a high pillar and can't see any possibility of getting down. I feel dizzy when I look down, but I have to get down all the same. I can't keep my balance and I want to fall over, but I don't fall. And I don't get a moment's peace until I'm down below. No rest until I've got to the ground...

Jean
I usually dream I'm lying under a high tree in a gloomy forest. I want to get up, right to the top and look round at the light landscape where the sun shines, and plunder the birds' nests where the golden eggs lie, and I climb and climb, but the trunk is so thick and so smooth, and it's such a long way to the first branch; but I know, if only I can get to the first branch, I can climb to the top ...

Sibylle Canonica (Julie) seduces audiences the minute she appears onstage. Since 1985, she has appeared on Munich’s two greatest stages in productions directed by Dorn, Tabori, Zadek and others. She has appeared in films by Wortmann and Geschonnek, as well as Caroline Link’s Oscar-nominated Beyond Silence.

Libgart Schwarz (Kristin) is unbridled imagination and the personification of incorruptibility. She joined the company at Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre in 1976 and has been at the Burgtheater in Vienna since 2000. She has worked with Stein, Grüber, Bondy and Breth and appeared in films directed by Handke, Wenders, Schroeter and Murnberger.

Sylvester Groth (Jean), born to the stage and cinema, is profound and opaque. He has worked on Germany’s most important stages since 1982, appearing in productions directed by Engel, Minks, Grüber and Zadek. On the big screen, he has been seen in films by Beyer, Levy, Dresen and Tarantino, among others.

Armin Holz (director, sets designer together with painter Matthias Weischer from Leipzig) is the obsessed outsider in the German theatre world. In addition to productions commissioned by theatres in Berlin and Bochum, he has always returned to his much-noticed independent productions, integrated artworks in which the poetry of the play’s text could unfold.

Bus transfer from Berlin Ostbahnhof (Am Ostbahnhof / Koppenstrasse)
Roundtrip € 18 (advance purchase only)
Departure: 7 pm