MIES JULIE Riverside Studios

August Strindberg’s play, which premiered in 1889, still has the power to shock. Director playwright Yael Farber sets her adaptation in present day South Africa on a remote Karoo homestead. This raw and erotic production, which premiered in Cape Town, is powerfully acted by Hilde Cronje and Bongile Mantsai. It was a smash hit at the 2012 Edinburgh Festival and in New York. The famous battle of the sexes becomes a racial game, fought with such physicality and such brutal and bloody savagery that at times it feels as if it were dance-theatre. The white mistress-black servant relationship is made all the more acute for being played out by characters whose sexual and political emotions are still informed by Apartheid and trapped by its history. The cook is no longer the servant’s fiancée but his elderly mother and former nanny to Julie, a master stroke for an adaptation, which is making a political statement about the ownership of South Africa. The servant likens the possible child in Julie’s womb, which he has fathered, as his “land-grab”. But she doesn’t want a mixed-race person to inherit land, which she thinks is rightfully hers, and goes to terrible lengths to stop the birth.