Strindberg claimed that he wrote Miss Julie during a month of “enforced celibacy” in 1888. The resulting tragedy has a snarling, pent-up energy. Patrick Marber’s 1995 version, originally written for TV, unfolds in a similarly compact 75 minutes – but turns less on sex than a very British class warfare.
We’re on the country estate of a Labour peer, on the night of the party’s 1945 election landslide. As the staff celebrate offstage – Chattanooga Choo Choo and In the Mood – John the chauffeur (Tom Varey) sinks a glass of his master’s best burgundy. Like Churchill, he says, it’s “robust, full-bodied – and finished”.
Swaying in her full-skirted black frock, the peer’s daughter comes below stairs like a wheedling kitten, demanding attention in a voice of thin-beaten silver. Liz Francis’s Julie provokes, drinks (“Do you think I’m a dreadful lush?”), flirts. “Do I shock you?” she purrs. “Not as much as you’d like to,” retorts John.
John is engaged to Christine the cook (an excellent Charlene Boyd, dog-tired but diligent) – but he and Julie fall into a combustible night and bleak morning after. Marber’s text shares a rebarbative gleam with his first plays, Dealer’s Choice and Closer. Steeped in spite, the writing is at its sharpest when at its meanest. “You’d shame a two-bit tart in Piccadilly,” sneers John, while Julie derides his beer swilling and “demob disaster” of a suit.
Dadiow Lin’s intimate, assured production has a malicious clarity. Handsomely designed by Eleanour Wintour, her in-the-round staging reveals John’s fingermarks red on Julie’s shoulder. Marber delineates the psychological pile-up of Julie’s upbringing (“You don’t know what it’s like to be daddy’s special girl”) but the show doesn’t thrum with Strindberg’s unhinged, poisonous desire. The heroine might be “off her rocker”, but tragedy doesn’t land with inevitable force.
It’s class that animates the disaster here – the election might promise a new dawn, but the characters can’t discard long-ingrained habits of deference or command. The country might seem on the cusp of change, but Varey’s eyes narrow with mortification, and he jumps to it with shoe polish and coffee grinder when his master calls.
• At Park theatre, London, until 28 February
