Panos Kougias: Interview for Miss Julie in the Foyer of the ITHP

The show Miss Julie, a subversive staging of August Strindberg’s classic masterpiece “Miss Julia” successfully staged at the Fournos Theater, continues for a few more performances in the Foyer of the Municipal Theater of Piraeus and is preparing to be presented at European festivals. We spoke with the director Panos Kougia.

The performance Miss Julie, which draws inspiration from the psychoanalytic work of August Strindberg, is a performance seen through the code of silence. What do you want to emphasize with this?

My intention was to discover the limits of how silence can be “deafening” in a form completely structured around the value of communication through dialogue. I perceive each performance as a new field of testing and verification, as a white canvas where everything is possible to happen and in the specific work, I noticed that while the whole nature around the heroes manifests instincts and sensations, they use speech as a “crutch” , in an attempt to hide their true feelings. Stripping them of this security and exposing them to the uncharted waters of silence was a one-way street.

Strindberg’s work is about love and the eternal battle of the two sexes but also the battle of classes. Miss Julie wishes to escape from her social class which determines her love preferences through her love for the unscrupulous servant Jean. How do you approach this “classiness” in our a-class age?

In our performance, Julia is not trying to escape or bridge classism through her physical union with Jean, but to have fun, to “take care” of her loneliness for a while. When you think about it, it’s deeply heartbreaking. A woman who theoretically “has everything”, but at the same time nothing personally of hers. The only exception, perhaps, is her canary, which Jean, through a perfectly cruel expression of his gender, decapitates. Julia resorts to a -willing?- human sacrifice, placing “her head on a board”, which Jean’s unrepentant patriarchy disfigures without mercy. In our reading, then, the class dimension of the work – or rather the class equivalent of the “master-servant” cited by Strindberg– it is rendered through a post-theatrical fallen persona of the Swedish royal court, who as a noble is as far removed in class from an average citizen of a democratic polity as Jean is from Julia.

Was Miss Julie and Jean’s love affair a love affair or a power relationship? Can there be a-class love?

You know, class lines have softened quite a bit since the mid-20th century. and the first revolutions and therefore social mobility seems more likely than ever. But in a reading around historical materialism, we should always consider the issues of power that self-evidently arise. And unfortunately, society still gives more power to men than to women. As a matter of fact, Julia from 1888 sketched by Strindberg until today, is doomed to defeat. Let the struggle and struggles of all of us be focused on making this ‘given’ a thing of the past.

Also, in our time there is a strong movement on gender issues. How liberating is that? Or maybe not;

I think that whatever mobility is, when its results bring greater inclusion and visibility, it is only positive. I recognize that there is a difficulty in adapting to society to accept new data, but very often this becomes a brake on conservative voices, arming them with hatred and baptizing social sensitivity, “totalitarianism of the right-wing”, in an attempt to silence and completely reverse reality.

© George Kassapidis

In the play we read that a post-theatrical narrative figure of the Swedish royal court, communicating directly with the audience, strives to transform the private of this house into the public. Tell us your opinion about the age of social media where precisely these boundaries between private and public have been lost.

I find it terrifying. Mainly the voluntary promotion of the individual, in any publication of his personal moments, with the sole aim of a Kafkaesque struggle to gather likes. And even scarier, modern liberal capitalism that invests in more and more impersonality. The more personal, the more commercial, therefore the more profitable. This human thirst for constant consumption of private content is embarrassing. This legalization of “gossip” is what very often leads to unimaginable acts, such as revenge porn, cyber rape, etc. In our play the Lady of the Court, acting as a mirror of modern society, does just that, without any guilt or mercy.

© George Kassapidis

How does the dominance of woke culture affect relationships?

“Sovereignty” could be invoked when a society recognized equal rights among its citizens. Woke culture is the vigilance against the injustice of minorities. As the founder of Lead Belly, a black artist from America, says, “Stay awake, keep your eyes open”. Gradually, of course, it is appropriated by the conservative part of this country, using it derogatorily and changing its meaning and purpose. Since Greece, according to supervised research, is at the bottom of the European map of human rights, I would characterize it more like a… “underdog” out of a need for visibility, more like sovereignty. Let the dialogue open about the dominance of woke culture, when women stop being murdered outside police stations, when transphobic attacks on LGBTI people stop happening in our city centers and when we stop hearing about appeals sinking into the Aegean (some of the last examples of the domestic agenda). Until then, let’s choose to stand with the minorities and not the privileged.

In this day and age, relationships come about through dating apps. The way you know each other may have changed, but does that affect the way we fall in love?

I believe that the way we fall in love does not change, but that love itself, fatally, has been transformed. It is a consequence of the fast pace and multi-collectivity of our times. I feel that things are already old before they have time to take root, and this frenzied need for new trends and hashtags inevitably affects love as well.

You wonder if love is a human autoimmune after all. How did you come to this thought and what is the conclusion?

It was a provocative question that we asked from our first rehearsals, which followed us throughout the search for the show’s score. They say that if we could collect every page that has been written on this world, we would see that one of the biggest issues that have concerned humanity is love, and this is because love has pains equal to those of childbirth. It’s a similar process anyway. Unrequited love, however, like the one we are negotiating, carries on its back the pain of a small death. And this is unbearable.