Adrian Curtin [AC]: What led you to adapt August Strindberg's play Miss Julie?

Kaite O’Reilly [KO’R]: I’d always found it interesting, but deeply problematic. It's misogynistic, it could be argued, of course. Strindberg was a product of his time, but there was something about the character dynamics that stayed in my head. I started imagining putting the play in that extraordinary period between the World Wars. And, as a disabled person and a proudly identifying ‘crip’, I thought it could be very interesting to explore disability as one of the last taboos. When it was written, the taboo might have been class, between the haughty Miss Julie and her underling. We know there have been other productions in the past that have touched on race etc., and I felt that one of the last taboos was around disability. Even now, in 2022, people seem to be surprised when disabled people are romantically involved with non-disabled people. And I wanted to explore that as a taboo.

I also wanted to set it in a period where it made sense to me. What if Julie's mother was actually a New Woman and had been involved with the Welsh suffrage movement? I was really interested in what they called ‘the surplus women’ at that time in history. If you’re a woman in 1919, you’ve been bred for a certain future. You were going to be a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and that's right across all the classes. What happens if that is interrupted by one million men being slaughtered at the Somme? And I find the impact of ‘the surplus women’ fascinating. They became teachers. They became useful. And then the tension between the men coming back from fighting and women who had been showing their skills so strongly, keeping everything going during the First World War. First of all, the path that they were supposed to follow, for many of them, was now blocked off because their fiances or possible future mates were not available because of the terrible death in the trenches. But not only that: they’re now supposed to move aside and become invisible to let the men have the jobs back again.