If Timofej Kulyabin really is “one of the most exciting directors in Russia right now,” as the Deutsches Theater Berlin reports, one may have to worry about Russian theater. In the Kammerspiele of the German Theater, Kuljabin turns Strindberg’s “Fräulein Julie” into an emotionally over-the-top affair room battle. Whereby the steamy states of excitement in the surface staging express themselves primarily in loudness and wild gestures. When the young noblewoman Julie seduces her proletarian servant Jean in order to free herself from ennui and feelings of senselessness, Strindberg multiplies class antagonisms with an overheated, destructive sexuality. In the vocabulary of today’s identity politics, one could say that it turns the fronts of discrimination when a woman uses sexuality as a weapon thanks to her superior status. It was a shock when it premiered in 1892, which makes the play a still explosive classic of modern theater.
Kulyabin shifts it to an upper-class present that might as well be playing in Moscow as it is in Miami. That would not be too bad if the staging of Strindberg’s sadomasochistic psychological torture retreats were not reduced in the style of a television film and the characters were banalized into types. Poor Linn Reusse has to scream a lot as Julie. First she gives the caricature of a bored millionaire’s daughter, then the mega-girl, then the little girl with a crush. No connection can be seen between the consistently sexist cliché dolls.
Felix Goeser plays Jean, Julie’s father’s chauffeur, as a dumb gate who trudges excitedly through the set of an upscale fitted kitchen. The point of the production is that Julie’s ex-fiancé Thomas (Božidar Kocevski) wants to take revenge on her for an embarrassing internet video – she had filmed him doing it with a rubber doll at her request. He pays Jean, gives him stage directions through a small ear speaker and films the games of humiliation with a hidden camera in order to take revenge on his part via internet video. What you do in very bad films to deal with a breakup. When the situation slips away and Jean does it with Julie at the kitchen counter, the fun stops for the unfortunate Thomas. And at least that is what he has in common with the quietly suffering viewer.