Fräulein Julie

Summer 1888. It has not taken August Strindberg long at all to write MISS JULIE. He committed it to paper between 22 July and 10 August, and in the ensuing weeks he wrote his famous preface (perhaps taking longer than for the play itself): „As modern characters living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it, I have described my figures as more vacillating and disintegrating than their predecessors, a mixture of the old and the new.“

Today we again find ourselves in a period of transition with dwindling security. If nothing else, the reason the plays of the late 1800s are still so relevant today is because they are messages from periods of upheaval, and because, in a way, we are just as lost as Jean and Julie. And because, when two entities are daydreaming and a third is scheming, there is no doubt as to who will be seizing the power.