A modern reimagining of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, running until 22 March.
OUR VERDICT
Two girls swig white wine in a plush contemporary kitchen while they wait for guests to arrive at an impromptu house party. We’re in Julie’s home. She turned 18 today, and her wealthy father has pulled out of her birthday dinner to attend an emergency board meeting.
Or, as she angrily suggests, to have sex with his 24-year-old girlfriend. “He’s basically a paedophile,” she suggests. “It’s basically incest… she could be his daughter.”
“So gross,” her friend Christine agrees, while pointing out that “technically, like, no” – it’s neither paedophilia nor incest. Christine is the sensible one. “You’re always correcting me,” Julie complains.
The privileged Julie (played by Synnøve Karlsen) is a self-willed, would-be wild child, but she’s also deeply troubled. Early in life, she lost her mother to suicide.
Bullied and slut-shamed after a topless photo was circulated on social media, she had to leave her posh school. And this morning, her boyfriend dumped her by text message because she was “too much”.
Christine (Sesley Hope), the only friend who has stood by her, is from a very different background. She lives with her mother, who has mental health issues. She shouldn’t be at the party at all: she has an interview at Cambridge tomorrow, her big chance to escape into the life of books she has always dreamed of.
The eternal triangle is complete with the arrival of Christine’s boyfriend. Jon (Tom Lewis) failed his GCSEs but is ambitious. He impressed Julie’s father during an internship she claims to have engineered – it might lead to a job, and eventually, he dreams of buying a house for him and Christine to live in.
It also emerges that Jon’s mother was the cleaner at Julie’s house, and he would tag along with her after school to help out. There, he fell under the spell of the beautiful Julie – who barely registered his existence.
The night wears on, dominated by the capricious Julie and her mood swings. The raucous party takes place off stage, occasionally bursting in for a round of wild dancing on the sleek black kitchen island that dominates the stage.
Our trio trade confidences and insults as the drama works through its exploration of power, status and gender roles.
The Midsummer’s Eve of August Strindberg’s late-Victorian ‘Miss Julie’ is replaced by the Winter Solstice in this gripping and witty re-working by Laura Lomas. She transforms the brooding Scandinavian intensity of the original into an all-too-recognisable world of teenage banter, sexting and selfies. Miss Julie’s symbolic canary is brilliantly transposed into a French bulldog.
“You just use your pain as a weapon, to beat up on other people,” says Christine, after Julie betrays her with Jon. But is Julie the ultimate victim? The party ends with her slitting her wrists in the bath.
Ten years on, Julie and Christine meet up again for the first time. Julie survived after all, has been through therapy and university and now has a cushy job as a PR in fashion. She is sober, restrained, perhaps still in recovery.
Jon, we learn, has a job in the city and owns the house he has always wanted. Christine is a single mum in a poky flat, having missed her one chance of escape. Strindberg’s tragic realism is very much alive and kicking.
- The House Party by Laura Lomas, after Miss Julie by August Strindberg
- Directed by Holly Race Roughan
- A Chichester Festival Theatre and Headlong co-production with Frantic Assembly
