The House Party – Leeds Playhouse

Writer: Laura Lomas

Director: Holly Race Roughan

The House Party, originally staged by Headlong at Chichester Festival Theatre last year and now starting a tour at Leeds Playhouse, is described as “afterMiss Julie by August Strindberg”. And it is “after” in two senses: the basic core of Strindberg’s plot is cloaked in today’s tensions and sexual freedoms and there is a short last act, ten years after the events of Julie’s party which does not seem to add a lot to the drama of the main play, being mainly concerned with rooting the characters in normality and bringing briefly to the fore Christine’s daughter (Rachael Leonce).

The original used the strict class codes of 19th century Swedish society as the focus of an examination of Darwinism. Set in the kitchen of a manor house, it settled on the social and sexual conflicts of Miss Julie, daughter of the house, and Jean, her father’s valet, who is engaged to the third character, another servant, Christine.

InThe House PartyJulie’s 18th birthday party (on the Winter Solstice) takes the place of the Midsummer gathering and the upstairs/downstairs barriers have come down: it is in the kitchen (opulently fitted out) and the party is (mostly) upstairs, but this is no longer “servants’ quarters”. Laura Lomas has to make Julie stand out from her contemporaries (dancing with a servant is no longer shocking!) and makes her a desperate girl, cloaking her loneliness in hedonistic and – a frequently used word in the play – sluttish behaviour. Maybe, as she says, she “wasn’t in my right mind” that night, but her boyfriend had just dumped her because “she kept making him do stuff” – and that’s not to mention that photo which went viral.

It’s a difficult part to make convincing, but especially so to exercise the magnetism that makes her friend, Christine, love her and Jon, her father’s chauffeur and son of her mother’s previous cleaner, break his heart with memories of her as a girl. It’s a measure of the remarkable performance of Synnøve Karlsen, in her stage debut, that she pulls it off in a heady mix of constant mood changes, wild dance, serious confessions and never-ending drinking. The remaining cast members also register strongly. Sesley Hope’s Christine conveys the hinterland of her character – the increasingly sick mother, the Cambridge interview she has not told Julie about – and Tom Lewis’ apparently straightforward Jon is drawn into Julie’s increasingly bizarre world.

Holly Race Roughan’s explosive production in a set dominated by a digital clock is full of noisy energy, party-goers in an ensemble of seven swarming into the action. This much is wholly successful, but tends to obscure the poetry, often the poetry of loneliness, which is in the text.

Runs until 1st March 2025, before continuing on tour