«Miss Julie is a modern character, she has come to the front and makes a fuss.» 

August Strindberg, 1889

CHARACTERS

. Miss Julie

. Miss Saint

SYNOPSIS

A student claims a mark. Julie is her name, but she calls herself Miss. Standing in front of the teacher’s desk, the one who rated her – and how he missed it, that very one she calls Sir – Miss Julie claims and claims. She
tests him, that one Sir. She doesn’t say immediately what she is brought about. Instead she starts tormenting him, that saintly Professor, by means of distressing stings of outrageous epitomes. Yes, she harasses him. Nonetheless there is no one opposite the desk. Julie is simply speaking to an empty chair, a torn picture and the desk, which pulled by a rope, insists on running away. When the desk is about to leave the scene, Julie will become the person with whom she resents and complains about, and that it is someone who comes from the unexpected, someone she would not suspect. Neither teacher nor Sir. However, by the same token: ain’t Miss Saint.

AUThOR'S NOTE

Ain't Miss Saint foi was written in 2006 and premiered in that June at the Sala Estúdio do Teatro da Trindade in Lisbon, when I had completed 33 years of age. It was resumed in October, that same year in Santiago Alquimista. By those times, I was not only assaulted by a sad intrigue of the gender kind, within the academic life, which had a much deep effect in myself image as the young teacher I was by then; but I also lived mesmerized by Thomas Bernhard's delirious prose and plays, whom someone [Steiner] has named a virtuoso of complaints and an artist of the exaggeration. The tough repetitions and a disonant musicality were artistically feeding my soul and morally conducting my warmed up blow. Meanwhile, I had started an unsucceeded affair with Samuel Beckett. from which I simply gathered the dryness of a beautiful landscape with no one in it. It was beautiful, most beautiful, as to simply be an abyss like kind of scenery, and to which one is much tempted to drag someone to it. In Ain't Miss Saint that person starts by being the actress, to whom is offered a travel into the martyrdom, from which only a brave soul is up to step out harmlessly. I was living as well in s skin pain by means of the burning caused by that ruthless sunlight which irradiates from the naturalistic plays by August Strindberg, mainly that noisy Miss Julie [Fröken Julie, 1889]. Here is the constellation which rules this short chamber play, almost a chamber of ordeal. In the vortex of it all you, can find Sofia.

                                       João Borges da Cunha