Workshop ideas

Home > Subject areas > Studying modern drama > Workshop ideas

Now you know the background to workshops and how useful they can be to your studies, why don’t you try Exploring Strindberg’s Miss Julie or Promenade by Maria Irene Fornes

Exploring Strindberg’s Miss Julie

The Swedish dramatist August Strindberg claimed to be writing for ‘modern man in a hurry’ which is why his plays are fairly short but dense with meaning. In the Preface to his play Miss Julie, he wrote a powerful and passionate plea for a more natural kind of acting and his plays are particularly suitable for investigation in a workshop situation because they demand an understanding of the psychological and sociological issues affecting the characters.

There are three characters in this play: the aristocratic Miss Julie and her servants Kristin (the cook) and Jean (her footman and ‘maintenance man.’) There is clear sexual attraction between the characters and a particularly smouldering passion between Miss Julie and Jean. One of the play’s major themes is status and the problems associated with love affairs between two people of different status. The action takes place around the event of a summer dance.

Try the following:

• Take the stage directions from the opening of the play, then, imagining you are each an estate agent, show the rest of your group around the stage setting.
• There is a section early in the scene where action takes place with no dialogue. In American translations this will be called ‘pantomime’ but this means ‘mime’ or ‘without speech’ in the English theatre tradition. Take it in turns to act out this incident and discuss what happens and why.
• Take the following short section of dialogue concerning a relationship and work on it: trying various ways of responding to each other Use the pause and hesitations to re-create the thoughts that are going on beneath the surface and thus find what we call the subtext.

Miss Julie (holding out her hand to Jean) Come outside with me and pick a few lilacs…

Jean: With you, Miss Julie

Miss Julie: Yes, with me.

Jean: It would never do. Absolutely not.

Miss Julie: I don’t understand what you mean…you couldn’t possibly be imagining things, could you?

Jean: No-not I……but the people.

• As this play is concerned with a dance and status, improvise a scene in which Miss Julie tries to entice Jean to dance with her. Then contrast this with Jean asking Kristin.
• The status game:One person is master or mistress and the other a servant. The master or mistress calls the servant for a ‘telling off’ but the servant looks away intermittently. Whenever the servant looks away, s/he makes a rude gesture and when this happens and the master or mistress notice, they hit their servant over the head with a balloon or rolled-up newspaper and continue the dressing down. Then the servant behaves similarly to another servant and the two play with ideas of status in an attempt to exchange low status for high status.
• Using the ideas from the play, devise a scene in which Miss Julie and Jean plan an illicit future together.
• Find a contemporary equivalent for the events of the play and present it as a series of short scenes in’soap’.
• Identify what you consider to be a key speech and work on presenting it with head and shoulders only visible as if of a scene in a movie where the face fills the entire screen.
• Whisper the same speech emphasising every phrase and idea. Take turns to comment and make suggestions.
• Take the original text of the play and use it for the ‘soap’ you devised earlier.

'Miss Julie' from Seven Plays by August Strindberg, trans. Arvid Paulson, Bantam Books Inc (1960)

Promenade by Maria Irene Fornes

This play was written by a Cuban playwright for the ‘Underground Theater’ of New York: an ‘off-off Broadway’ form of alternative theatre that flourished in Greenwich Village in the mid 1960s. The play takes place in a prison and various other locations in a prison and most of the characters simply are known by their number. There are virtually no stage directions and no precise indications as to the setting. It is a very short play. As a complete contrast to Strindberg’s play think about the following piece of dialogue:

(105 and 106 sit on the grass)

105: Did you really like that party?

106: Yes….I liked it……

105: I liked it too……

106: You did?

105: Yes…..

(There is the sound of traffic)

You know?

106: What?

105: To discover what everyone has always known is not important.

106: No, it isn’t

'Promenade' by Maria Irene Fornes from Robert J Schroeder, ed., The Underground Theatre, Bantam Books Inc (1968)

Try this dialogue many ways and decide what is happening in your mind as these words come to the surface.

• Explore the use of the dots in this dialogue.
• Improvise a scene in which two people are having a similar conversation but in a more familiar setting like a bar or café.
• Take some of the verse sections of this play and intone, sing or shout them.
• Find a ritual way of performing the ‘digging’ scene with rhythm.
• Select or create music that you think would best accompany this scene.
• If this play does not ‘work’ by being ‘realistic’ how does it work and why?

This content has been written by Ken Pickering, author of Studying modern drama