Actress Sienna Miller, who was last seen in “GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” can take solace in at least one way from the critical response to “After Miss Julie,” which opened at the American Airlines Theater on Thursday: Most of the critics thought the playwright Patrick Marber update of August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” was even worse than she was.
Marber transposes “Miss Julie” from 19th century Sweden to Great Britain in 1945 on the eve of the victory of the Labor Party. The plot remains the same: the high-born Miss Julie seduces a member of the servant class, here a chauffeur played by Jonny Lee Miller (no relation to Sienna Miller), with savage results.
Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal (scroll down to the last review) may have been the harshest: All that playwright Patrick Marber has done for “Miss Julie” “is tart it up with politics and vulgarize it beyond recognition.
“As for Ms. Miller, a model turned second-tier movie star, all she does is stalk around the stage striking vampy poses and looking really, really skinny. I almost felt sorry for her, but the truth is that she has no more business playing a classic stage role than I have posing for the cover of Vogue. The Roundabout Theatre Company should be ashamed of itself for asking her to do so.”
Teachout was not alone in expressing “almost” sympathy. “I was rooting for Sienna Miller,” Ben Brantley wrote in the New York Times, before commenting: “If Julie is written as clashing chords of conflicted impulses, Ms Miller plays them like a novice at a piano, plunking down each note loudly and individually. She conveys Anger, Self-Abasement, Sorrow and Fear very clearly and, on occasion, convincingly. But the segues among these feelings are never natural, let alone inevitable, so that when events take a turn for the lurid, the audience is laughing when it should be recoiling.”
Linda Winer of Newsday:
“More mysterious than either character’s motive is the reason for Patrick Marber’s adaptation – which, despite the misleading title, is not a sequel to the Strindberg but an unnecessary new version”
John Simon at Bloomberg News was (once again) something of an outlier, calling Sienna Miller’s performance “persuasive” even as he said the play was “certainly no improvement on the original.”
“Sienna Miller is convincing enough in the title role, managing superciliousness and condescension, lust and humiliation, with unassailable proficiency. Yet there is some sort of ultimate aristocratic hauteur in which she is a bit lacking, making her downfall less dramatic.”
To be fair, there were other reviews that were not harsh:
Elizabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post: the “fear — or inability — of making the two leads as unhinged or as odious as they need to be.. keeps “After Miss Julie” from taking off.”
David Finkle of Theatermania: “Garbed in Michael Krass’ accurate notion of a 1940′s summer frock and shoes and Paul Huntley’s period wig, Miller — who is making her Broadway debut here — doesn’t disgrace herself. She’s good, but hers is a superficial Miss Julie, rather than a person of emotional depth.”
Jonathan Mandell
Jonathan Mandell, who tweets as New York Theater, is a native New Yorker and third-generation journalist with diverse experience on newspapers, magazines and websites.He has ...
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