ARTS As Miss Julie, young mistress of the manor in this new Roundabout production of Patrick Marber’s play, Sienna Miller makes a soft, slithering entrance. It’s an anti-star move, asking us to forget Miller’s tabloid-blazoned love life, but one in keeping with her character: power doesn’t have to shout.
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| Jonny Lee Miller and Sienna Miller |
Even American audiences who have never heard of Clement Attlee can grasp the intended transatlantic relevance: the old is being swept aside for the new. Marber’s play, which first aired on the BBC in 1995, even anticipates the US in late 2009: dreams fade and reality intrudes.
For Marber’s Julie, the morning after consists of recriminations exchanged with John, the chauffeur (Jonny Lee Miller) in the employ of Julie’s Labour peer father. The night before, her seduction of him was not so much enacted as commanded. Now, it is John’s turn to be insolent. Julie insists: “Stand up when you speak to me. Remember your position!” John replies: “Which one, Madam? There were so many.”
Such tart wit, plentiful in Marber’s crackling 1995 play Dealer’s Choice, had started to evaporate by the time of his Closer, in 1997. A kind of aerobic earnestness – sex is oh such a drag – had settled in.
After Miss Julie also suffers from the Higher Seriousness. Very little in its thematic unfolding – the cruelties of class, in particular – adds to what we infer immediately on surveying Allen Moyer’s marvellously detailed country-kitchen set. The question is not whether Julie and John will couple on the wooden butcher block, but when.
Director Mark Brokaw and his actors – Marin Ireland as Christine, the cook and John’s fiancée, is the third member of the cast – excavate Marber’s text doggedly, exploring love, hate, fury, desire. Jonny Lee Miller gives the evening’s indelible performance. At the play’s end he sits affectingly alone, polishing his master’s shoes and trying to absorb all the emotional uproar. 
Tel +1 212 719 1300
