The Minerva’s last production of Miss Julie, in 2014, was a version by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and Strindberg’s study of sex, class and power has since become more commonly adapted by female playwrights – Polly Stenham, Amy Ng and Kaite O’Reilly among them. Laura Lomas’s new version is a specific corrective to the misogyny blatantly expressed in his preface to the 1888 original.
Like Stenham, Lomas reframes the story as a debauched modern-day birthday party held by newly single Julie in her minted father’s townhouse. Lomas’s major change is to expand the role of the cook, Kristin, who becomes Julie’s BFF, Christine. They dance around the kitchen’s marbled island to songs by Beyoncé and Fred Again, pausing to pose for selfies and anticipate the guests’ arrival (“not that many – 100”).
Christine is the patient listener and reasoner, Julie the motormouth spouting alternative facts from Instagram. The pair’s warm repartee is momentarily soured by Julie’s classism, sneering at Christine for her love of Staffordshire bull terriers and at her scouse boyfriend Jon (counterpart to the valet Jean in Strindberg’s play), who is from the same council estate as Christine and is the son of Julie’s family’s cleaner.
Age is a defining difference for Strindberg’s triangle of characters: his Julie is 25, Jean and Kristin five and 10 years older respectively. The House Party’s characters are roughly the same age as Julie, who is turning 18, but Josh Finan (Jon) and Rachelle Diedericks (Christine) lend their characters a maturity born from graft. As Julie, Nadia Parkes veers between pained vulnerability and flamboyant ferment as she gets closer to Jon.
A set of speeches delineating the characters’ dreams do not intrigue as they should but Lomas writes authentic teenage exchanges which ping between the trio. She also combines acute sexual politics with abundant humour: Jon can sound as unconvincing telling Julie he can dance as he does telling Christine he loves her. Never a play for pet lovers, there is a grisly update that stretches belief and it does not ring true that Christine would so easily jeopardise her future by chugging shots the night before a Cambridge University interview. But the predicaments facing Julie in particular are credibly set out, the brutality of teenagers’ online lives is deftly drawn and Maybelle Laye’s perceptive costume design enhances the characters.
The production is made with two of our most movement-minded theatre companies, Headlong and Frantic Assembly. So it’s never in doubt that the island on Loren Elstein’s set will become a dancefloor for a dozen sweaty revellers who occasionally charge through scenes (movement direction by Scott Graham). There are plenty of Saltburn-esque contrasts here: outsiders and insiders, excess and emptiness, invisibility and over-exposure. The raucous party gains an extra dimension from seating some audience members amid the action. Strindberg decreed a small stage and a small auditorium for his play; Holly Race Roughan’s production ups the intimacy with scenes of frisky writhing and boozy retching sandwiched between spectators.
Lomas adds a short coda that shrewdly follows Strindberg’s notion of characters either on the way up or down the social ladder but it is slight and, coming after the interval, does not have sufficient charge to round off an otherwise often compelling evening with a trio of potent performances.
At the Minerva theatre, Chichester, until 1 June
