Through the years she has been completely "mad", absolutely "crazy" and more frequently, just plain "wild".
And now, in the opening words of Frank McGuinness's new version of August Strindberg's tragedy of sex, class and power struggles, Miss Julie is quite simply "off her head".
With that first colloquialism, delivered by Declan Conlon's valet Jean in an accent that indicates Irish servitude, it is tempting to see Landmark's production as a transposition of the play to an Anglo-Irish context - yet that is not the intention. The time remains the late 19th century, the place is rural Sweden, the occasion is Midsummer's Eve.
That Miss Julie is tonight more wild than usual owes something to the intoxication of the event, during which strict social barriers are temporarily dissolved in ribald games. When she soon appears in the kitchen inhabited by Jean and his betrothed, the cook Kristin (an excellent Mary Murray), Catherine Walker presents a figure immediately capricious and vulnerable, always in skittish motion, like a ribbon in a breeze or a curious songbird.
It is a heightened performance in what its original author described as a "naturalistic tragedy", but director Michael Barker-Caven recognises a more complicated array of symbols and shocks within Strindberg's supposed naturalism. It is a tone handsomely underscored by Joe Vanek's set, the realistic detail of his design curving upwards to the suggestion of a roof, with a skylight, looming above with ominous significance.
Having suffered an ankle injury before opening night, Declan Conlon performed with the use of a cane, a prop that may have hindered the pace of performance while affecting the dynamic between the leads in curious ways.
Traditionally Miss Julie's early instruction that Jean kiss her shoe marks her at her most giddily exploitative, but watching Conlon's (literally) staggering performance made even casual commands seem shot through with sadism. The balance of power pivots throughout the play, its major slalom shift occurring when Julie and Jean flee the servants' dance, which Barker-Caven and choreographer Liz Roche conceive of as a brutal, gender-bending bacchanalia.
It is the sexual anxiety of the play, rather than its class anxiety, and its dance of desire and destruction that is more likely to resonate with a modern audience. But while McGuinness's version gives the play a rough, involving idiom, it won't mask the neurotically misogynistic conceit of the original, where gender equality spells social ruin.
"We're equals now," pronounces Julie when she and Jean have been levelled in the bedroom, but it is she who is mercilessly destroyed by the affair, incarcerated in loathing and hysteria. Crucially, Walker never bows to the shrillness Strindberg intended - her desperate agitation is considered and moving against Murray's striking stillness - while Conlon's socially ambitious Jean can be instantly cowed by his master's voice. The production retains the trappings of a period drama, but as McGuinness gives new words to old commands, the destructive force of its power play remains timeless. - Peter Crawley
Until March 1
Carlos Prieto (cello) - NCH John Field Room, Dublin
The Mexican cellist Carlos Prieto is so enamoured of his Stradivarius cello that he's written a book about it. Last year's English language The Adventures of a Cello followed its publication in Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.
And, as Prieto explained in his presentation about the book at the NCH John Field Room on Monday, the latest publication is also the best, offering the most up-to-date information on an instrument which began life in Cremona in 1720, went to Spain in 1782 (where it was used in the premiere of Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross) before being acquired by an Irish merchant who brought it back to this country in 1818.
Prieto regaled his listeners with stories about the cello's past and present, including details of its airline booking name (Miss Cello Prieto), its accumulation of airmiles, and its role in a security incident when Soviet officials counted only human passengers and thought someone had absconded. He also offered a short programme of solo cello pieces. In his hands the instrument sounds like one that responds to the slightest of stimuli, with a soft alluring tone that is especially attractive in the lower register.
Prieto offered two works written for himself and his unusual instrument, John Kinsella's Una Giga para Carlos, a slightly dizzy jig with some Latin overtones, and four movements from the 2007 Suite for Solo Cello by Mexican composer Samuel Zyman, who seems to like an almost breathless moto perpetuo style.
There were inconsistencies in intonation which limited the enjoyment of these recent pieces. The rewards were greater in four movements from Bach's Solo Cello Suite in C, where the plain, unprobing style of the playing, completely without rhetoric or drama, communicated with great purity. - Michael Dervan
