Writer: Patrick Marber
Director: Dadiow Lin
August Strindberg’s volatile take on seduction and coercion gains new life in this terrific revival of Patrick Marber’s reimagining of the 1888 play.
Marber’s version shifts the action from Sweden to England, and to the night of Winston Churchill’s election defeat to Clement Attlee in 1945, against a backdrop of post-war fervour, while maintaining the kitchen setting within the servants’ quarters, keeping the rigid class conflict from the original material.
It also preserves Strindberg’s characters. Here, Miss Julie (Liz Francis) is the daughter of a powerful MP rather than that of a Count, yet she is still served by her servants, chauffeur John (Tom Varey) and kitchen maid Christine (Charlene Boyd). Mistress and chaueffuer are drawn to each other on a night when mingling of classes is tolerated, much like the Midsummer setting of the original, with horrifying repercussions. The production moves at breakneck speed, seeing Julie and John’s catastrophic liaison have devastating consequences over the course of just 70 minutes.
As Julie, Francis finds a good balance between naivety, vulnerability and sadistic violence, especially in the play’s climax. Julie’s arrival is coquettish, playfully toying with John on a night when servants and their mistress are dangerously intertwined, with Francis effectively conveying Julie’s multifaceted character. There is something terrifically entrancing about Francis’ Julie, drifting across the stage upon first arrival, before violently and fiercely stalking it much later. Although it takes a little time for Julie to get going, once she gives in to John, her character becomes much more searing, breaking down in a fiery and devastating conclusion. Julie is far more interesting after John’s seduction, expressing a rage and violence which Francis rises to with success.
It is with John that Julie’s life is completely unravelled, with the conniving, manipulative chauffeur brought out with aplomb by Tom Varey. Varey’s John is appropriately arrogant, seeing himself as better than his superiors and desperate for a life outside of serving the upper classes. John’s superiority maintains the severity of Strindberg’s version, yet as the play unfolds, John, like Julie, too, finds himself bound by the class system and restricted by the ‘slave mentality’ Strindberg refers to the character as suffering from in his original premise, and this sense of frustration is evoked effectively in Varey’s delivery. The depiction of John is appropriately cruel and crass, with his vulgar language, though, not as shocking now as it was originally, and so John’s brutality has been enhanced by Dadiow Lin’s direction, where the physicality and sexual nature of his aggression evoke the same shock and violent potential of the calculating character.
The prostrate consequence for both characters leads to a violent and bloody ending that both Francis and Varey portray with terrific vigour. Lin’s direction is well configured to Park Theatre’s smaller, more intimate space, and this makes the frantic sexual attraction and shocking violence between the pair much more effective. Julie and John erupt into passionate embraces, and collapse into bloody, excruciating and shocking acts of violence, including making a victim of Julie’s poor canary, another consequence of John’s menacing coercion, which propel the play’s finish.
Marber’s reimagining maintains Julie’s terrific misandrist rant, capturing the original’s fierce criticism of social equality and rights for women, but here makes it a more layered concept than Strindberg’s misogyny, exposing Julie’s hate as a consequence of patriarchal abuse. John’s use of Julie is much crueller here than how Strindberg intended it in his original, propelling its resulting chaos more effectively.
This version also gives more to Christine, too, with Charlene Boyd’s portrayal devastating and fiercely judgmental in equal measure as she sees her own dreams collapse around her. Christine, in this version, has more bite delivered thrillingly by Boyd in this effective and dark three-hander.
Lin’s direction is combined well with Eleanour Wintour’s sparse set design to keep the action firmly focused on the breakdown of the characters and social conventions, which lead to such awful consequences. It is a little hindered, though, by some moments of pausing which take too long and do scupper the momentum, and a few of the exchanges are spread too widely across the stage, which can see some expressions and gestures missed.
Nevertheless, this is a bold revival of Marber’s take on Strindberg’s classic. It is the dawn of a new era for the three, with Churchill’s defeat and World War Two over, yet the real devastation only just begins in this gripping play. It is a reimagining which selects all the best bits of Strindberg’s original, and combines it with newer material that enhances the divides, lusts and violence between the three to produce a provocative and enthralling piece of theatre.
Runs until 28 February 2026
