The Final Paper for this semester will be a thesis-driven academic paper (10-12 pages, double-spaced; or 3000 to 3600 words) in which you compare, contrast, and evaluate three adaptations of the same work. I use the term adaptation quite expansively, to include not only multiple live/theatrical productions, but also films, TV series, and more. The term “adaptation” can also apply to historical events that have been fictionalized or classic stories that have been reimagined for contemporary audiences. (It can also, if you are more technically oriented, involve three applications of the same technology; or three possible solutions to the same set of technical problems.) What matters most is that your project:

Have a clear research component – you must include at least 5 reputable and professional sources (peer-reviewed, academic sources are preferred).

Engage in a systematic process of analysis, in which you compare, contrast, and evaluate the subjects of your discussion.

Make an argument, not only about the similarities and differences that exist among the examples you’ve chosen, but also about why these similarities and differences matter, what we can learn from them, and what they illustrate about “the world” (the history of theater; different historical periods and their concerns; changes in audience expectations; the meaning of the work; etc.). The point is to use your research and examples in support of a larger argument that is both non-trivial and non-obvious. In other words, the stakes of your argument should matter to the people in your field (and to me as a reader). Moreover, it should not be a self-evident fact that everyone agrees with; rather, it should involve a unique interpretation or a debatable point of view that the paper will prove to the reader.

The paper should follow MLA or Chicago Style formatting and citation guidelines.

TITLE: Designing Determinism: How Three Miss Julie Adaptations Rewrite Power Through Space

Link to three versions of productions:

Thomas Ostermeier’s Miss Julie: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1hk4y167XV/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=147c57c02a7e3f2b6edc7735407ff39b

National Theatre’s Miss Julie: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1YK4y1A7UN/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=147c57c02a7e3f2b6edc7735407ff39b

Mike Figgis’ Film Miss Julie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofunJg6f0Yo or Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Miss-Julie-Mike-Figgis/dp/B001NTHOLU

Part I: Final Paper Outline

Introduction

Claim: August Strindberg’s Miss Julie is a foundational text of naturalist theater, but its continued relevance depends on adaptations that re-contextualize its power dynamics for contemporary audiences, with design acting as the primary tool for this reinterpretation. Mise-en-scène is the primary lens of adaptation across three modern reinterpretations of Miss Julie.

Stake and relevancy: Space and design fundamentally alter the play’s meaning, shifting Strindberg’s biological fatalism into contemporary critiques of class, labor, and power. The once said “naturalistic tragedy” might have more human factors with these new lenses.

Content: Briefly introduce the original setting in Strindberg’s writing and the three adaptations. Clearly state that the paper compares their spatial, visual, and theatrical design choices, or mise-en-scène.

“Naturalistic Tragedy” as Strindberg’s Driving Force

Claim: To understand how mise-en-scène adapts Miss Julie, we must first understand Strindberg’s naturalism and view of determinism in this play. I will set the prototype of what the three productions are adapting from.

Evidence: Templeton’s article on “naturalistic tragedy,” stating that Miss Julie is structured around biological determinism and inherited class.

Mise-en-scène: What is it?

Claim: Contemporary adaptations often operate through design rather than textual changes. To present and discuss the theoretical support for this essay.

Evidence: Sidiropoulou’s article: mise-en-scène rescripts meaning through spatial composition, visual motifs, sound, bodies, and technology.

Mike Figgis’s Cinematic Claustrophobia

Claim: Figgis uses the tools of cinema—specifically a single, lavish set, and a restless camera—not to open up the play but to intensify its claustrophobia, framing the conflict as an intimate, psychological battle with inescapable, tragic consequences. The camera also acts as a voyeur, adding voyeurism into the discussion of Julie’s tragedy.

Evidence:

The decision to use one vast, opulent kitchen set, shot in sequence, to preserve theatrical intensity and create a cage.

Use of handheld cameras and intimate close-ups to create visceral, uncomfortable proximity to humans.

Use of split-screen during sex scenes to fragment perspective and build tension and a sense of male-gaze.

The haunting, non-diegetic music that externalizes the characters’ psychological turmoil.

Overall low-contrast color quality of the film, except for the top and the end of the film.

Thomas Ostermeier’s Deconstruction of Naturalism in a Modern Void

Claim: Ostermeier’s design actively dismantles Strindberg’s naturalism through a bleak, revolving set and visceral, in-the-face performance techniques, shifting the tragedy from a predetermined naturalist fate to a more absurd and nihilistic commentary on contemporary class relations.

Evidence

The revolving, minimalist kitchen set in a modern house (?), which literalizes the characters’ shifting power dynamics.

The replacement of Midsummer’s heat with falling snow outside the window, creating a cold, isolating atmosphere.

The inclusion of direct audience address, breaking the fourth wall and implicating the viewer.

The violent, non-textual acts, including an on-stage slaughter of a chicken, as a design element that shocks and re-centers the play on brutal physicality.

The National Theatre’s Julie: Contemporary Struggle of Race, Gender, and Privilege

Claim: Polly Stenham’s Julie uses a transposed setting—a modern London mansion—and key symbolic alterations to shift the central conflict from a 19th-century class struggle to a 21st-century crisis of privilege, race, and trauma.

Evidence:

The design of the kitchen as part of a “high-tech, high-status” London home, making the class divide about contemporary wealth.

Jean is established as an immigrant. A very relevant contemporary social discourse.

The critical alteration of Julie killing her own bird, a directorial and design choice that re-frames the climax as an act of self-destructive trauma rather than a murder by Jean.

The costuming and props that signify modern, hyper-wealthy decadence versus the precarious status of the domestic worker.

Compare & Contrast

Claim: When examined together, the design trajectories of these three adaptations demonstrate a clear movement from intensified naturalism to deconstructed postmodernism, and finally to a translated "transplant" adaptation, each using its aesthetic to ask different questions of the source material and its audience.

Evidence:

Contrast Figgis’s internal, psychological focus, using close-ups to read each character’s mind with Ostermeier's external, societal critique with big stage pictures.

Contrast Ostermeier’s universalizing nihilism with the National Theatre’s specific, politically charged contemporary context.

Analyze how the treatment of key symbols (the bird and the festival dance) changes meaning across all three designs.

Analyze color palette used across all three designs.

Analyze the ending across all three designs: how the suicide is suggested, and how tragic/desperate the ending make the audience feel.

Conclusion

Claim: The enduring power of Miss Julie lies not in a fixed, naturalist interpretation but in its capacity to be re-imagined through design, which allows the play to speak directly to the evolving concerns of class, gender, and power in different eras.

Part II: Annotated Bibliography

Templeton, Alice. “‘Miss Julie’ as ‘A Naturalistic Tragedy.’” Theatre Journal, vol. 42, no. 4, 1990, pp. 468–80. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3207723. Accessed 25 Nov.

2025.

Templeton’s article provides a foundational analysis of Miss Julie as a “naturalistic tragedy,” a term Strindberg deliberately uses in his preface. She identifies the play’s structural reliance on deterministic forces, such as heredity, environment, social class construct, and psychological degeneration. It argues that Strindberg frames Julie’s downfall not as a choice but as a biologically inflected inevitability. Templeton closely

reads the preface, emphasizing Strindberg’s pseudo-scientific claims about degeneration, female hysteria, and social Darwinism. She also demonstrates how the play’s plot progression mimics classical tragedy: Julie’s moment of rebellion is followed by recognition, reversal, and destruction, all shaped by forces beyond her control.

This article is essential to support my argument because it defines the prototype that later adaptations accept, resist, or rewrite. By understanding how Strindberg constructs tragedy through determinism, I can analyze how mise-en-scène becomes the mechanism of reinterpretation. For example, in National Theatre’s Julie, the contemporary London flat environment shifts determinism from heredity to neoliberal privilege and racialized labor structures. Ostermeier’s revolving kitchen rewrites inevitability through bodily exhaustion and socio-economic violence. Figgis’s single-room film transforms determinism into a cinematic showing of cause and effect and surveillance: the camera becomes a force that determines the characters’ psychological collapse. Templeton’s articulation of “naturalistic tragedy” gives me the conceptual baseline against which spatial alterations can be seen as political interventions. Without this source as a prototype of comparison, it would be harder to claim that design functions as the new “deterministic force” shaping characters’ fates in modern adaptations.

Sidiropoulou, Avra. “Mise-en-Scène as Adaptation.” Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, no. 12, 2015.

Sidiropoulou’s essay argues that in contemporary theaters, adaptation often functions through mise-en-scène rather than through text. Directors re-script theater cannons by

constructing visual and spatial environments that generate new meanings. She emphasizes that mise-en-scène is an active writing practice involving architecture, movement, light, bodies, scenographic textures, sound, and objects. Rather than treating design as supplemental, she positions it as central to dramaturgy, arguing that audiences increasingly feel space as narrative argument. Her examples draw from European contemporary performance, where classics are frequently restaged with radically reinterpreted visual worlds that reframe original power dynamics. This source is crucial to my paper because it provides the theoretical lens through which I analyze all three Miss Julie adaptations. Sidiropoulou’s argument allows me to articulate how each mise-en-scène rewrites the play’s themes: in NT’s version, the curation of kitchen in foreground and the rave party room in the background dramatize visibility and isolation; in Ostermeier, mess, blood, and real kitchen operations foreground labor and class violence; in Figgis, handheld cinematography and single-room compression turn the play into a psychological trap. Sidiropoulou’s work helps me claim that mise-en-scène is the primary site where Strindberg’s naturalistic determinism is dismantled or reconfigured. This supports my thesis that design is not decorative but telling stories, shaping how contemporary audiences interpret power.

Boenisch, Peter M. “Realism Reloaded: Ostermeier’s Method.” The Schaubühne Berlin under Thomas Ostermeier: Reinventing Realism, edited by Peter M. Boenisch, Methuen Drama, 2020, pp. 23–46.

In this chapter, Boenisch articulates how Thomas Ostermeier reimagines realism by shifting it away from Strindbergian naturalism and toward an overtly political, materially grounded performance style. Across pp. 23–46, though not directly mentioning Miss Julie, Boenisch argues that Ostermeier’s realism is not a mimetic replication of everyday life but an analysis of it: a staging method that reveals contemporary socio-economic pressures through highly tactile environments, corporeal intensity, and detailed scenographic curations. He describes Ostermeier’s characteristic use of functioning appliances, messy kitchens, sweat, fluids, and real-time physical labor—all elements that transform the stage into a socially legible workspace rather than a metaphorical backdrop. This approach positions the actor’s body as the central site of conflict, where exhaustion, violence, and intimacy become indicators of class struggle and neoliberal pains. Boenisch emphasizes that Ostermeier uses classical texts not for fidelity but as frameworks through which contemporary material conditions can erupt onstage. This chapter is vital to my argument because it provides the theoretical vocabulary for analyzing Ostermeier’s Miss Julie as an adaptation constructed through mise-en-scène. Boenisch’s account of realism as socio-material critique allows me to argue that Ostermeier reinterprets Strindberg’s determinism through the physical architecture of the kitchen itself: a world of labor, tools, heat, and bodily risk that shapes the characters’ psychological breakdown. By situating realism within the politics of the body and space, Boenisch directly supports my larger thesis that constructed environment functions as the primary adaptive mechanism across the three Miss Julie versions I examine.

Yang, Nayoung. “Counterattack of Julie: Feminist Reading of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie.” International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 3, 2016,

pp. 91–97.

Matthews, Peter. “Miss Julie: The Three Bergs.” Current, The Criterion Collection, 21 Jan. 2008, www.criterion.com/current/posts/624-miss-julie-the-three-bergs

Part III: Introduction

Through over a century of reinterpretations, August Strindberg’s Miss Julie has proved remarkably responsive to shifting political discourses. Strindberg’s original writing is based on his naturalist belief in biological determinism—an ideology that categorizes Julie’s downfall as the necessary outcome of heredity, class, and gender. Modern adaptations increasingly interrogate this thinking. In the most recent National Theatre’s Julie (2018), Thomas Ostermeier’s production for the Schaubühne, and Mike Figgis’s 1999 film, the most profound transformation takes place not completely through texts, but also in mise-en-scène: the spatial, visual, and sensory design elements. Each adaptation shapes, if not manipulates, the viewer’s perspective, framing Julie’s tragedy as the product of entirely different forces. My essay claims that these three adaptations reveal how mise-en-scène and design function as a form of adaptation, rewriting the play’s core conflicts by repositioning them within new contexts.

In the National Theatre’s Julie, the expansive London flat, with a minimalist kitchen in the foreground and a dazzling rave party room in the background, replaces determinism with the pressures of celebrity loneliness and racialized domestic labor.

Ostermeier, by contrast, pushes naturalism into a deconstructed hyper-realism: his kitchen is sweaty, violent, and dangerous, a space where class conflict arises through physical exhaustion and risk. Figgis’s film takes a third approach, leveraging the confinement of a single space and a roving handheld camera to show the characters’ psychology as a matter of surveillance and spectatorship. In each case, the design is not decorative but argumentative. The curation of each design element become the force that determines behavior.

My compare and contrast in the essay help contemporary audience understand more about adaptation. Instead of seeing works in terms of fidelity to the source text, a mise-en-scène-centered analysis shows the possibility that active design decisions forge new meanings for contemporary audiences. Comparing these three adaptations through the lens of space, visual storytelling, and key material detail, this paper expands an understanding of adaptation in modern theater and film, one where scenography is a form of interpretation, and design itself becomes an active participation in political critique.