In connection with the centenary of the first edition of Miss Julie in 1988, Barry Jacobs and I published Strindberg's Miss Julie: A Play and its Transpositions. The book discusses in its first part the play's biographical background, its ideological and literary predecessors, some of its characteristic features, and its impact on later dramatists. In the second part, different forms of presentation are dealt with: Miss Julie in translation, on stage, as film, TV play, opera and ballet.

Unlike that book, the combination of this book and the website here offered to the reader is primarily reception-oriented. It is, however, not a socio-cultural study of how a select group of readers and spectators have experienced Strindberg's text and Bergman's performance. It is a demonstration of how one and the same person – myself – has experienced Miss Julie in these two media forms. Given this limitation, the examination has the advantage that it can deal more thoroughly with text and performance than a sociological reception study normally would do.

As the title indicates, my purpose here is to examine in a very concrete way the differences between drama as text and as performance. The choice of only one drama text and one performance based on it made it possible to examine both in depth. Strindberg's best known drama and Bergman's successful and on the whole faithful staging of it proved to suit this purpose.

I saw Bergman's 1985 performance. Yet the nearly thirty years that have passed since then and the fact that I have mainly based my examination on a DVD registration of the performance place me in a different position from a spectator in 1985. A stage performance is a live, nonrepeatable phenomenon. Even if a DVD registration may come very close to the real theatre performance, it differs from it in that the audience is visibly and aurally absent and that the visualized space is not the same as that of the theatre spectator, unless the whole stage is made visible which is not always the case.