When Miss Julie opened on Dramaten's Small Stage, it was B's second staging of the play. Four years earlier he had directed it as Julie at the Residenztheater in Munich with German actors and in a translation by Peter Weiss (Strindberg, 1984). In Munich, Julie was presented together with Ibsen's A Doll's House – here, as often in Germany, entitled Nora – and B's own stage adaptation of his TV serial Scenes from a Marriage. The premiere took place on April 30, 1981. The three plays were presented in one and the same evening, Nora and Julie consecutively on the Main Stage of the Residenztheater, Scenes from a Marriage at the Theater am Marstall close by. The same ticket gave access to all three performances. The idea was to present what B called “three sisters” who all found themselves in genderdetermined crisis situations.

B's interpretation in Munich formed the basis for his Dramaten production seven years later. In the meantime, the play had been published in the scholarly edition August Strindbergs Samlade Verk, a reason why B wanted to stage the play anew and this time in Swedish. Another reason was naturally that he wished to direct this very Swedish play in his native language with Swedish actors in a Swedish theatre for a Swedish audience.

In addition to the theatre program, the audience was provided with a separate edition of the preface and the play (Strindberg, 1985b). A few passages, it was shown here, had been cut; but the changes with regard to Kristin's mime and the Ballet were not shown.

The audience was confronted with an attractive and unusually powerful Kristin aged 40. Jean, aged 32, combined a boyish vitality with a need to embellish his life with invented stories. With her 43 years Julie was visibly marked by her past; this was especially noticeable when Jean called her a child “at twenty-five.” Partly brought up as a boy, she was rather masculine with her short, straight hair and her authoritarian manner.