Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn forever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
I was sitting at the Belvoir Theatre on tuesday night to see Miss Julie by August Strindberg. My divinaton was that it was a depressing but profound psychosexual drama, or so I'd been told. I found it to be more, and strangely pressing for those who search for love.. Miss Julie, the trapped aristocrat and her servant, Jean, who represented the seed of the nouveau riche are unbridled by dreams, that turn in their way into an inner crisis of truth. Their relationship in its class tension and emotive exasperation existed as a grand metaphor for the narratives of modern escapism. In their dialogue it called itself love, however, it was more a way to cope, to shake the boundaries, to tear up the footlay that was so dauntingly repressive. For that the pain of the character's situation, their delusions found a justification. Did they need it? I had to ask myself "had anything really changed? Was love of that kind an ideology of abandon, of escape from self?"
The stage was constructed of a simple plank of timber that stretched out as a kitchen shelf, suspended two metres or so above and out to the ends of the stage. Upon it objects were placed, and the plank was used as a sort of balancing scale. Every object; every person's perspective never allowed you to hold that objective sympathy with a defined protagonist; a quantative judgement. This was the success of the play for me. Strindberg asked questions I simply couldn't answer everytime the plank-scale swung like a seesaw. All the protagonists' situational dilemmas were never denied their pertinence.
Their situation displayed something, in a hyperbolic fashion that i can't seem to shake off with relationships, or their form in any current version. It's as if feeling in such speed, in such a desperate attempt to escape self is a deep contract we make with pleasure, with sex, with the ecstacy of abandon. Affairs and desires are more than simply an interplay of mind and sexual relations. We sell out for that vivacious sense of abandon and dreams and forget friendship, love. The themes were so heavy on the nostalgia of the life i'd experienced in that strangely austere and vacuous place we call society... that amalgamation of clubs, bars, glam, drunk modernity. The place where postmodern identity politics replace the humble family. I thought we drink, we make a contract to abandon, we make eyes at that dark figure whose face won't show itself in the light, and find ourselves in the dark of a bed, fumbling, hands across each others bodies. Or we deny it and we find platonic contracts, friendships of a greater scope, that let idealism breathe out of that overly reduced obsession with the perfect aesthetic - bleep, bleep, bleep, boom boom, boom.
Strindberg definitely made the suggestion that happiness was a flame for the desireful, and most people i know have had a difficult time lighting it. The play presents this dilemma in that place of modernity, some furious and frustrated abyss, that we've come back out of but can't help but look back at and wonder, and i'm not ashamed...
"What is happiness?"
A list of heavy and grand words, that cast their shadows and their light... states that are always with the "presentiment of their end, causing the suffering, resolve of (de-con)struction at their very peak"
Perhaps.
