An explosive Russian adaptation of "Miss Julie," which swept the awards at last year's Strindberg Festival in Stockholm, is sure to set the playwright spinning in his grave like a lathe.
In this production, controversial director Boris Poyenesovsky has -- English-speakers will be glad to hear -- ripped out much of Strindberg's text and replaced it with his own brew of nonverbal invention, acrobatics and movement-based spectacle.
Although now in his 60s, Poyenesovsky is still ablaze with the same impassioned, tempestuous nature that established him as St Petersburg's foremost experimental theater director. With a tough, gnarled sensuality and an overdeveloped sense of the absurd, his work is unlike anything on offer in the city's mainstream theaters.
"Miss Julie," Poyenesovsky's closest brush yet with strictly conventional drama, is certainly an unusual choice for him. "I chose it because I don't like Strindberg," he said bluntly. "I have a strong opinion about Strindberg. I wanted to punish him a little."
The play tells the story of a young aristocratic woman who is irresistibly drawn to Jean, a servant in her family home. After they sleep together, both are overcome by confusion about their social roles. Jean becomes disdainful and ridiculously arrogant; Julie is filled with a feeling of shame that eventually leads to her suicide.
Poyenesovsky, predictably, has shifted some of the traditional emphases of the play.
"In many productions Jean is like an Adonis: blond, well-built, beautiful, tempting for Julie," said Poyenesovsky. "But the actor who plays Jean in my production is thin and weedy. His face has a kind of anti-charm. But you can see all of evolution in his eyes. He wants everything and is everything. That's why she is attracted to him."
Poyenesovsky's own best-known play, "Theater Silence," is a monstrous masterpiece that exists in a stunning 39 different incarnations. It lasts anywhere from two to five hours depending on the imagination and stamina of the actors. In the piece the director approaches a host of philosophical and personal problems entirely from a choreographic point of view.
Movement, he feels, can express far more than words. The end result -- as in "Miss Julie" -- is an extravaganza of unruly dance, bizarre mime, arbitrary plotlines and plenty of Poyenesovskyan tangents.
Behind the dazzling sophistication of his work, Poyenesovsky's objectives are simple enough. "I want to extract the dialogue from plays and banish it from theater altogether," he says. "It's only information. I want to go right back to the creation of meaning. I want the audience to feel like they're sitting in the Ark, that anything is possible for the future of the world."
The mainstay of Poyenesovsky's directing approach is to sit back and relax while the actors do most of the work.
"In realistic and naturalistic theater," he says, "because the spectators are so familiar with the conventions, they know exactly what the actors are doing, almost better than the actors themselves. The actor is just the tool. But my idea is to use the actors as auteurs. Because they are in control, anything might happen. I believe that it's possible to be an actor and a spectator at the same time."
Much of Poyenesovsky's life and work has become the stuff of legend. In his criticism as well as his practical work, he has inspired a generation of directors and is sometimes referred to as the "Russian Craig," a reference to Gordon Craig, an English theater visionary who lived in the early part of the 20th century.
But Poyenesovsky wasn't always so revered. Needless to say, his theatrical aspirations were not shared by the Soviet cultural bureaucrats who controlled the scene for so long. "I never had any interest in the political system," he says with a shrug. "I am a person. I was born. I have a first and a second name. I exist independently of all that nonsense."