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"If an audience wanted to hear a play, they would stay at home and read it. People come to the theatre to see the sub-text"... Constantin Stanislavski

Watching ‘Miss Julia' written by August Strindberg and directed and produced by Revue Factory Productions will be beneficial to drama students education because they will be given the opportunity to see a Naturalistic play performed. It is one thing to read a play but it is quite another to watch one. Students will see how the text is lifted off the page to create a dramatic and entertaining performance and be given the option to ask the actors how they developed their characters, raised the stakes and controlled the emotion. Students will also observe the use of symbolism and sub text to give them a better understanding on how to accomplish it themselves or to examine its use.

Teachers can give students the chance to see a full length play done by trained actors in their own classroom where it's a safe environment for students to ask questions. This saves the teacher from having to organize a class trip and they can use the performance to analyze and write a written response or use it as an example of Naturalism if they are studying Realism and Naturalist plays and playwrights in class.

Strindberg was one of the founders of modern theatre and one of the creators of naturalism. He was often compared to Henrik Ibsen but claimed not to like ‘slice of life theatre', he thought it was boring and needed a slice of art. ‘Miss Julia' is one of his most famous plays and it was written before he delved heavily into symbolism. It is an experimental play and in its time was extremely revolutionary. Audiences had been used to sets being painted onto backdrops and actors moving with purpose, never to turn their back on the audience. In ‘Miss Julia' Strindberg has a realistic set, (we have downsized ours in order to make it easier to transport) Kristen has a long bit of business where she turns her back on the audience and there is no curtain drop.

‘Miss Julia' is about class struggle and the battle of the sexes. Strindberg was known as a womanizer but he was also sometimes an advocate for the woman's suffrage movement. His father was from a bourgeois family but his mother was a servant so he himself always had an internal struggle with classism and sexism. The overall message in the play is that these traditional roles are not constructive to society. Putting labels and names on things does not work. Everyone should be equal and then, and only then, will there be harmony.

Students can analyze and reflect on the roles and relationships in the situation and how it contributes to the dramatic action in the play. Was it an internal struggle or a psychological battle? They can think about the time of the play and how it reflected on society, as well as discuss if the lives and the work the characters did influenced their thoughts and actions and therefore the outcome in the play.