Fröken Julie (1888), cornerstone of the international Strindberg canon, emerged once again in a new garb in the 2012 adaptation of South African dramatist and director Yaël Farber, entitled Mies Julie. The devastating erotic encounter between the aristocratic fröken and her father's servant is relocated in the kitchen of a white Afrikaner farmer—a descendant of the Boer settlers of South Africa—in the scorching heat of the Karoo, a semi-desert plateau on South Africa's Eastern Cape. As the play opens, a party is under way outside, with black farm workers celebrating Freedom Day while the master, Julie's father, is away. Midsummer Eve as the time of the play's events is replaced by a highly charged date for the people of South Africa. It is the night of April 27, 2012, which marks the eighteenth anniversary of the end of apartheid and the first free election in South Africa, where people of color were finally granted voting rights, and Nelson Mandela became president. But as the play progresses, it soon becomes increasingly apparent that unresolved tensions are still simmering under the surface some two decades after the end of the colonial era. One exchange between Julie and, as Strindberg's Jean is renamed, John early on in the play, shows just how slow change is to emerge:

This shocking provocation from the bored mies—daughter of the white farmer who still owns the land—and her continued sense of entitlement point to the dramatic core of which this new version of Strindberg's play shoots out. The purpose of this essay is to explore how Fröken Julie, detached from its originating contexts, effectively partakes in both local and global post-apartheid and post-colonial discourses. Even before we turn to specific details of Farber's version, it must be noted that it is a text positioned strategically in time and space as a discursive event. The adaptation was written in 2012, which was both the centennial of Strindberg's death and the eighteenth anniversary of the end of apartheid.