Naughty new role for Miss Trixie
HELEN GEORGE is going to star as a sexually voracious aristocrat caught up in a sadomasochistic struggle.
The actress, who plays platinum blonde Trixie in the popular BBC drama Call The Midwife, and was a recent entrant on Strictly Come Dancing, will play the title role in after Miss Julie, playwright Patrick Marber’s adaptation of august Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
Marber shifted the tale of a titled lady’s dangerous liaison with her father’s valet from 19th- century Sweden to the english country estate of a Socialist peer on the eve of the Labour Party win over Winston Churchill in 1945.
helen described Miss Julie (she’s pictured in the role) as ‘complicated, fragile, arrogant — and vile — but also sensitive, with Socialist values even though she’s from this huge estate’.
Because she played the role a decade ago in a student production, she has had time to ponder Miss Julie’s psychological make-up, noting how she had this ‘strange upbringing, with odd behavioural patterns from her parents which, I think, left her emotionally damaged’.
helen added that Miss Julie has a line where she says that it’s ‘ not fair that a child should experience the world in such a harsh way; when their eyes are so undeveloped’.
There are explosions of sexual tension and class warfare when Miss Julie visits below-stairs and encounters her father’s chauffeur John — and Christine his fiancée.
When alone, Miss Julie and John engage in the sort of sexual acts, behind a closed door, that most people (let alone the nuns on Call The Midwife) have never heard of.
‘John taunts her and is just so threatening,’ helen said of the pair’s relationship.
She recently did a private reading of the play attended by Marber, Danny Moar (from the Theatre Royal in Bath) and anthony Banks, who will direct the production.
She added that ‘since I got my P45’ after being kicked off Strictly, she has thrown herself into helping get the play off the ground. The dance show was fun while it lasted, though: ‘I loved it! and, of course, I didn’t want to go; but part of me has been thinking that it’s so nice to have a rest because I feel like I’ve aged ten years in the last ten weeks!’
helen appears in the Christmas Day special edition of Call The Midwife on BBC1; and in the fifth series about the nuns and midwives of Nonnatus house, which begins in January (a sixth series will start shooting next year).
Miss Julie runs at the Theatre Royal, Bath, from May 24 before visiting theatres in Guildford, Cambridge, Brighton, Richmond and Milton Keynes. The producers hope then to transfer the drama into the West end.
‘It’s such a wonderful part for a woman,’ helen said, explaining that she’d been looking for a role that was the antithesis of how she’s perceived on Call The Midwife. Strictly speaking, after Miss Julie is just that part.