IT HAS been five years since feted South African director Yael Farber last featured in the Galway Arts Festival. In 2008, Molora, her visceral and compelling version of Sophocles’ Oresteia was one of the high points of that year’s programme.
Now she returns to Galway with another searing adaptation of a theatre classic; Mies Julie which relocates Strindberg’s 1888 drama to present era South Africa and arrives here heaped with awards and accolades.
While Farber first achieved international prominence for plays she created in South Africa, she has since relocated to Montreal and is currently in New Delhi working on a new play, Nirbhaya, inspired by the shocking case that hit the headlines last year about the rape and death of a young woman on a city bus there. It was from India that she took part in this interview about Mies Julie’s upcoming Galway run.
‘South Africa always inspires me’
I begin by asking her whether she is an artist, like Joyce, whose homeland remains central to her work regardless of where they live.
“Until very recently South Africa has remained the sole and soul source of inspiration for new creations,” she replies. “But with the work I am currently working on in India about sexual violence - and a recent adaptation of Antigone regarding American foreign policy - I know I am ready to source from other wells.
“But always South Africa will be the front centre focus or the undercurrent that inspires me. It will be what Salman Rushdie says of India for him, ‘that messy sea to which he must always return.’
Farber says of her working methods: “There is always an over-riding way in which I work. I mine relentlessly for truth and aim to tell this truth with excellence of craft from all of us involved. I am a perfectionist. I love to work with dark subtext that offers redemption. I work in a very physical way with performers. I ask that they give everything – as I do of myself. My aesthetic shows up again and again in my work and my preoccupations. What is it they say? We keep telling the same story again in seemingly new ways.”
Mies Julie has toured internationally and received great acclaim but was the response it got in South Africa of most importance to Farber?
“Yes,” she replies. “The litmus test I use is: if I focus on creating a South African work about South Africa for South African audiences I will not lose my way. The integrity of the work will remain intact. If I allow myself a different focus I will lose my ‘true north’.
“Likewise creating this new work Nirbhaya in India currently – responses here will be most telling to me. That is not to say I seek praise in South Africa or India about works that concern these societies. Often the work will touch nerves that create a negative response. As long as we are creating reactions of passion within the societies for whom we dare speak we are in business.”
Sexual dynamics
The highly charged sexual and class dynamics of Strindberg’s play make it a powerful metaphor/microcosm of the forces that shape society. In relocating the drama to South Africa, Farber still keeps faith with the original.
“Strindberg’s central core narrative is the spine for this work,” she states. “He opened many drawers with his original through the relationship between Jean and Miss Julie. Placing this adaptation in South Africa I have taken all aspects of the sexual, the violence, the love and the socio-political questions to a further extreme. But Strindberg’s core narrative is what sparked the idea how the national can be played out in the personal.”
One significant change Farber makes is with the character Kristin, who is a cook in Strindberg’s version and seemingly betrothed to Jean. In Farber’s adaptation she becomes Christine, who is both John’s mother and Julie’s nanny.
Farber explains that it was common for white children to be largely raised by black servants, and that such women would often have little time to spend with their own children.
“The majority of a domestic worker’s time and energy will go into the children she is being paid to mind,” she says. “It is most common to have a domestic worker who lives away from her own children and with the family - though not in the house but in separate quarters - with whom she is employed.
“This was certainly the case in the South Africa I grew up in. Precisely this ironic absence in her own children’s life and the presence for her white charges is an intrinsic part of the primal dynamic I wanted to set up between John and Julie in the play.”
A Galway stay
Interestingly, Farber is no stranger to Galway, having lived here for a while in 1998. She has fond memories of that time.
“My mother’s father’s people were from Belfast,” she reveals. “I have always felt a very powerful connection to Irish writing, humour, ways of expression. In 1998 I had just won Best National Director and wanted to take time out. Ireland was the natural choice.
“The majority of my time was spent in Dublin and Galway. I poured coffee and worked backstage at Druid and lived in a little flat off Quay Street. I froze my arse off through the winter with barely the 50p to fire up the electricity for the heater
“ I had a tough but magical time in Galway for months. The gals I poured coffee with did not know about my work back home. I made money painting paper lampshades with poetry for Pearl who once had a shop called Pearls of Wisdom on Quay Street.
“And I hung out with the Druid crew also passing through for those months. It was an extraordinary time for me. Not always easy but then who wants easy? I had biting cold, little cash, whiskey, and fine people. It was a true time.”
So will she find time amid her hectic schedule to visit Galway again during Mies Julie’s run?
“Yes, but my visit will be brief I am very sad to say,” she tells me. “I wish I was there longer. I am around for about two days. It remains and will always be personally one of the most significant places in the world to me.”
And her final thoughts on Mies Julie ahead of its Galway Arts Festival bow? “An audience who have lived intimately with questions of land and colonising and the ferocity of living those issues may find themselves in Mies Julie. For this reason I am excited to know how it resonates in Ireland.”
Mies Julie is at the Town Hall Theatre from Monday July 20 to Sunday 28 at 8pm with a matinee on Saturday 27 at 2pm. Tickets are available through www.galwayartsfestival.com and the Festival Box Office, Galway Tourist Office, Forster Street.
