Miss Julie at Maidment Studio

By FRANCIS TILL

It is a tribute to playwright August Strindberg that Miss Julie remains a cornucopia after 115 years, but extracting those riches takes deft direction and consummate acting. This production has both, in solid measure.

There is a peculiar force to Strindberg's work that comes from seeing the seminal elements of today's theatre in their nascent forms. His theories of theatrical architecture underpin so much of what knowing writers have been crafting for the past 50 years that he can seem endlessly derivative.

That can present a barrier to a complete appreciation of his arguments and devices, especially since his Stockholm milieu is a century past and was obscure even in its own period.

One directorial response to this has been to update Miss Julie by changing the setting and action or taking liberties with the translations. Director Vadim Ledogorov falls into neither of these traps.

But if Julie was written as a self-absorbed, hysterical monster, she is today a perverse heroine in full, if self-destructive rebellion against a suffocating social duvet.

Falling from her mouth, the lines that were meant to blacken, ennoble instead.

What was once a vitiating Freudian trance is today a tormented fugue state, although, ironically, then, like now, one plausibly induced by sexual conflict.

There are some minor problems in the production. Jean (Michael Lawrence) does not project the animal power that would rationalise the central act of the play, leaving the action a bit muddy.

The primary demonstrations of carnality in the production, in fact, come, both quite exquisitely, from one of the revellers during a scene-marking ballet and in a gestural reference to masturbation from Countess Julie herself.

Christine (Donogh Rees), although scorchingly anchored, is a bit too matronly.

The play also stands entirely on its political legs, which is acceptable, although not a full reading.

But none of this matters, ultimately, because Katherine Kennard, as Julie, takes such fertile control that the century between, and its dross, simply fall away, leaving us hoping, futilely, that the tragedy does not require a complete unfolding. And that is high theatre.