Polly Stenham is not the first dramatist to update Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie relocated the action to the night of Labour’s election victory in 1945. Yaël Farber’s Mies Julie set the story in a post-apartheid South Africa still simmering with racial and class tensions. Both these versions gave the play a strong political context signally lacking in Stenham’s version, which, although well acted – not least by The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby – doesn’t make total sense.
In Strindberg’s 1888 original, a count’s daughter fatally seduces her father’s valet. In Stenham’s version we are in modern London, where Julie, the 33-year-old daughter of a rich tycoon, is having a wild birthday bash in her dad’s townhouse. Down in the kitchen her father’s black chauffeur, Jean, who has been deputed to keep an eye on proceedings, passes the time with his Brazilian fiancee, Kristina. The coke-snorting Julie, in turmoil after a breakup with her partner, comes downstairs and demands a dance with Jean that, as in Strindberg, has disastrous results.
Strindberg set the play in a world of rigid class distinctions for which Stenham finds no exact equivalent: if today a fat cat’s daughter had sex with a chauffeur, it might lead to chit-chat on social media but would hardly provoke the participants into dreaming of taking flight. Stenham’s solution is to substitute money for class: the gulf between Julie and Jean is here financial. But, although the published version tells us that the play’s two servants are “first-generation economic or political immigrants”, the text itself gives us scant information about their backgrounds. You wonder why Jean would want to run off with an employer who insultingly tells him that “You’re sticking the maid”. Stenham’s answer is to hint that Jean wants to get his hands on Julie’s wealth, but that merely turns him into a cynical opportunist.
Put simply, the crisis in Stenham’s version seems disproportionate to the events. Carrie Cracknell’s production and Tom Scutt’s design are similarly overblown. Whatever his misogyny, one of Strindberg’s insights was to realise that his play demanded “a small stage and a small auditorium”. Here the play has to occupy a big theatre.
This leads to awkward transitions from the upstairs party to the downstairs kitchen, where the characters confront each other across a space like the Grand Canyon. The party itself looks over-choreographed rather than spontaneous, and the production makes excessive use of that ominous background hum that, ever since Ivo van Hove’s A View from the Bridge, has become a staple feature of cutting-edge productions.
Fortunately, the acting is good. Kirby catches perfectly the idea of Julie as a damaged, overgrown child torn between total dependence on others and suspicion that she is seen as a moneybox anyone can shake and rattle. Kirby manages to make her both vindictive and helpless, and when she asks “Am I insane?” it is with genuine pathos. Eric Kofi Abrefa is not helped by Jean’s lack of a backstory but conveys the character’s mix of attraction and repulsion towards the unstable Julie, and Thalissa Teixeira lends Kristina an unusual sexual vibrancy. These actors do sterling work but in Stenham’s version I never felt that the tragic outcome was dictated by an inexorable dramatic force.
•Julie is at the Lyttelton at the National Theatre, London, until 8 September. Box office: 020-7452 300.
