Bergman's Miss Julie, opening at Dramaten on December 7, 1985, was his second stage
production of the play and the first one in Swedish. Four years earlier he had staged it
at the Residenztheater in Munich with German actors, a production which has been
thoroughly documented. ¹

Central to Bergman's Munich production was the idea that Julie, the daughter
of a count, "is a big helpless animal who is done to death by smoothly functioning beasts
of prey. ... Defeated by her own kind, destroyed by the others." ² By "the others" Bergman
apparently meant not only Jean, the Count's servant, and his 'fiancée' Kristin, the cook,
but also the people who figured more prominently in both stage versions than in the play
text. It is possible that Alf Sjöberg's well-known film version of the play provided an
inspiration.

In Bergman's view Julie is a woman "who is already wounded and who fights
for her life in a ... hopeless kind of way -- hopeless because she wants only to die." She is
a "loser," while Jean is a "winner." This does not mean that she is weak. On the contrary,
"when Julie makes up her mind to die, ... she becomes the stronger of the two. And Jean
collapses." ³

Bergman thus pitted the life-denying Julie against the life-affirming Jean --
much as he had earlier, in The Seventh Seal, contrasted the Knight with his servant Jöns.
In that respect, his stage interpretation meant a very loyal reading of the text. But in his
interpretation of the third character, the cook Kristin, he differed with almost all earlier
directors of the play. Kristin was depicted not as "a female slave ... conventional and
lethargic; instinctively hypocritical" -- Strindberg's characterization of her in the preface
to the play -- but as a young, sensual, forceful woman, who "rules not only her kitchen,
but also Jean. She is the reason why Jean is a winner -- because [she] is the strongest of
them all. She knows that one day ... [she and Jean] will rule this house together." ⁴

By and large, the conception of the play and characters underlying the Mu-
nich production was carried over to the one in Stockholm. Again the audience was con-
fronted with a young, attractive, powerful Kristin ( Gerti Kulle). Jean ( Peter Stormare)
combined a boyish vitality with a desire to embellish his life with made-up stories. Julie
( Marie Göranzon) was visibly marked by the past. Brought up as a boy, she was
pronouncedly masculine with her short, straight hair and her authoritarian manners. Her
attitude to Jean was contemptuous rather than inciting -- as though she was suffering
from a sexually grounded fear of being dominated by a man.

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