After Miss Julie

Patrick Marber, After Miss Julie, London Classic Theatre, Portsmouth New Theatre Royal, 9 March.

Patrick Marber's reworking of Strindberg came to Portsmouth in the middle of a long run of appropriately one-night stands. It might, if you wanted it to, offer parallels between the breakdown of Miss Julie in the original dark Scandinavian version and the breaking down of class barriers in 1945 Britain. But it might be overstating the case to claim that class barriers were quite as fragile or ever broken down quite like the coquettish and desperate Miss Julie here.

The play works out a traditional 'eternal triangle' with an 'Upstairs Downstairs' theme. In this production, it builds to inevitable and disturbing tragedy from a quiet beginning. It is the entrance of Kathryn Ritchie as Julie that moves us into a plot that very much writes itself from thereon in. Andy Dowbiggin's below stairs John is her victim (Do you think I'm a dreadful lush?) who puts up some token respectful resistance before giving way to the unfortunate flaw in him that he has admired the younger woman throughout the years he has watched her growing up. She's a penalty kick for a good-looking older man like him. Helen Barford as the previously intended wife is stoic and sensible but without the wanton glamour of her rival.

John and Julie's plans for elopement are undermined by her admission that she has no money of her own, not a bean, it's all in trust. And their relationship has revealed its built-in weaknesses long before the ill-conceived idea has any chance of being realized. We might be slightly surprised to find that Julie loses her virginity, on the evening in question and not previously, but it was 1945 and it is another symbolic barrier that is broken by the dispiriting events as blood becomes a recurring leitmotif in the later scenes.

It is Strindberg after all and thus not packed with ready-made slapstick humour but Marber provides enough lines for Kathryn Ritchie's performance to elicit laughter from a grim drama that brings Tennessee Williams to mind as much as any other dramatist.

It would be worth your time if you live in any of the towns it's coming to in the second half of its tour.

http://www.londonclassictheatre.co.uk/currentlyamj.htm