Written in 1995, Patrick Marber transposes August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie to the balmy summer evening of 7 July 1945. A large country house in Yorkshire. While the inhabitants and staff celebrate the post-war landslide General Election victory of Clement Attlee’s Labour over Churchill’s Conservative Party, three people below stairs conduct their own power struggle of class and sexual politics, fuelled – but simultaneously restricted – by their own desire, status —-and the shifting sands of the wider socio-political landscape.
August Strindberg’s original play, Fröken Julie – written in 1888 – is considered a benchmark in naturalistic theatre. For his version, playwright Patrick Marber relocates the events to the humid evening of 7 July 1945, where the inhabitants and staff at a large English country house, belonging to a Labour peer, celebrate the party’s landslide General Election victory which marks Winston Churchill’s departure from office.
Meanwhile, below stairs, the mistress of the house sets in motion a sexually-charged battle of wits between herself and two servants which forms the basis of both a brutal love story and a battle for supremacy informed by the trappings of the class structure at a moment of significant societal change.
After Miss Julie was originally commissioned in 1995 for the BBC as part of their Performance offering – a programme which ran for seven series on BBC 2 and featured both classic and new plays, with radical reworkings of some texts which included Penny Woolcock’s Macbeth On The Estate. Marber also directed his updated version which starred Phil Daniels, Kathy Burke and Geraldine Somerville in the title role.
In 2003 it was adapted for the stage in collaboration with cast members Kelly Reilly (Miss Julie), Richard Coyle (John), Helen Baxendale (Christine), and the director Michael Grandage for a premiere at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It has subsequently been revived by, amongst other, the Young Vic in the West End and at the Tod Haimes Theatre on Broadway.
Of his both his initial screenplay and the subsequent stage script, Marber has described the text as being “not a translation of Miss Julie. Rather, it is a ‘version’ of the original – with all the ambiguity that word might suggest. I have been unfaithful to the original. But conscious that infidelity might be an act of love.”
This external production is presented by Falling Stars Theatre/ FarrenHeight and is not part of our Season Pass Scheme.
