Julie wobbles into the kitchen, hiding from her own 21st birthday party. Lights bounce off the walls from her sparkly dress – she’s her own glitterball, though the party has long turned sour.
Performed in Dutch with English surtitles, Rebecca Frecknall’s debut production for ITA – the landmark company which frequently visits Britain – is her own version of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888). Chloe Lamford designs a stark modern kitchen, all hard metal surfaces and everything tucked behind brushed-steel doors, save for a fearsome strip of knives and cleavers.
Strindberg wrote the tragedy during the protracted breakup of his marriage. His views on gender relations were notorious – though he claimed his misogyny was “only the reverse of a terrible desire”. Terrible desire crackles the air as Julie slouches opposite Jan, her father’s older, newlywed chauffeur. Minne Koole’s Jan is limber and hawkish, but a weak foundation for her escape.
Frecknall’s productions (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cabaret) always have a magnetic physical life, with emotion propelling characters like an itch beneath the skin. Julie dresses Jan in Dad’s swank suit; Christine the housekeeper (Hannah Hoekstra, righteously fine) slides a foot into Julie’s strappy heels – people briefly try on other lives. Eefje Paddenburg’s Julie claims the spotlight, but she’s also a terrific watcher – gazing at others as if trying to work out what real life looks like.
Past midnight, an exhausted Christine goes home: “And then there were two”. Waiting for Julie and Jan to clinch feels almost unbearable. Paddenburg’s sensational performance makes Julie all sparkle and damage, a poor little rich girl untrusted with her trust fund. She and Jan wound each other with status (another dynamic from Strindberg’s marriage): “You think that because I wanted you, I respect you?” she spits.
Frecknall often excavates the messy ground between desire and shame. Sometimes, as in Cabaret, a whole society shudders towards what it should resist. In Julie, she powerfully traces the taut trajectory of characters both desperately vulnerable and trapped in class and history.
In the morning, the doors swing open, light catching pale bare skin like a reproach. The fancy-tap sink overflows until it’s water that ripples off the walls, rather than Julie’s sequins. It’s time to leave the party.
• At ITA, Amsterdam, until 10 March
