FringeReview UK 2026
After Miss Julie
Kim Bromovsky
Genre: Adaptation, Classical and Shakespeare, Costume, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy
Venue: Park Theatre 90, Finsbury Park
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Marber’s adaptation of Strindberg’s 1888 Miss Julie, as After Miss Julie – set in the Britain of the 1945 Labour landslide – was first broadcast in 1995: then revised and staged in 2003. This Theatre Royal Bath Productions touring revival, directed by Dadiow Lin featuring Liz Francis, Tom Varey, and Charlene Boyd arrives at Park Theatre 90 till February 28.
Provocative, absorbing take on Strindberg’s 1888 masterpiece. Fine cast led by Liz Francis make much of demob denouements.
Review
“A translator should invade openly and like a monarch”, said Dryden and this imperialist dictum might be what Patrick Marber, here taking on class war, had in mind as an adaptor. “”I have been unfaithful to the original” he states cheerfully. Marber’s adaptation of Strindberg’s 1888 Miss Julie, as After Miss Julie – set in the Britain of the 1945 Labour landslide – was first broadcast in 1995: then revised and staged in 2003. This Theatre Royal Bath Productions touring revival, directed by Dadiow Lin featuring Liz Francis, Tom Varey, and Charlene Boyd arrives at Park Theatre 90 till February 28.
Set in a horseshoe, Eleanor Wintour’s two separable kitchen tables are completed with two chairs and very few props, lit moodily by Jack Hathaway with sound by Ed Lewis down the wireless. Wintour’s period utilitarian costumes break into a dance when we see Miss Julie’s going-away outfit.
Strindberg’s original shocks in its transgressive sexuality, betrayal, and misogyny. Strindberg continues to shock and refuses to settle into a classic. Marber’s adaptation explores what at first might seem the last time such class-gender tensions might be explosively breached. The original takes place on Midsummer Eve, the night women can claim their lovers. This version’s on July 28 1945 and as we open Christine the maid listens to Atlee’s victory speech. Later her fiancé John refers to snaffled burgundy as like Churchill: “robust, full bodied – and finished.” Class is shifting and a rift of assumptions are about to cascade into the sea.
This is further enhanced when Miss Julie, daughter of a soon-returning Labour Peer who’s far more patriarchal than that implies – wants to dance with John; in front of his fiancée. They exit briefly only for John to offer commentary.
In this version no invading peasants mock or parody the couple. Instead sounds of drunken merrymaking on Election night hover, which turning ugly hastens seduction. Both characters behave provocatively and Francis summons the petulance and hauteur necessary to slap John after shamelessly leading him on.
The inevitable sexual denouement begins to unseam from the original, negotiating the fifty-seven years intervening when loss of virginity was hardly a fate worse than death. Using explicit language in a switchback of recriminations the couple verbally re-enact Julie’s violent and escapist desires. Here though there’s no long-build fantasy. Both know it’s an illusion.
Francis – in her first major London role – is finely-tuned to Julie’s hoity edge. Someone both giddy and entitled, arrogant yet fleetingly tender: drawn to John over 18 years. Inexperienced she plays at class equality yet in Marber’s hands Julie emerges as perhaps more Strindbergian: more volatile, capricious, trapped: capable of giving out cruel commands herself: though she orders John to order her to a final action.
The mix of someone who can’t relinquish class arrogance makes Julie fleetingly resemble Hedda Gabler: someone else who has more choice than she’ll allow. Here, Julie’s dilemma can’t be what it was in 1888, whatever her father does. The seesaw of kind/cruel plays out with her and John in a thrilling, nasty way. Julie here is no superficial victim of class, but a complex collaborator when choice is available. Marber’s stating class war is more active than any sexual one.
With less triggers to Julie’s destruction to hand, Marber complicates John, fracturing the relationship with cruelty on his side turning to what seems love and remorse, and on hers, a psychological unhinging. So when the bells signalling the lord’s return snap John back into servility, it unravels again: there’s a ritual ordering and parting – even to the bird-killing scene where Julie finds John the right knife.
The motivation for this latter psychodrama isn’t quite convincing, but it shifts towards the era’s film noir. Richard Varey ably conveys John’s hauteur and steely charm. Nor is Varey’s cocky John quite the callous original. He can no longer prove so automatically servile, though Marber tries to suggest he is whilst wearing a certain demob-suit independence; which might not convince everyone.
Christine’s is now more fully realised: conscience, common sense, catalyst. Boyd grounds her role as a Scottish woman who’s made her choices; with more say than previously. Boyd’s both tender and authoritative, furious and ultimately in control. She falls asleep from sheer hard work; her rhythms of graft ultimately dictate the pace of the play: the sudden arrest of impetuous fooleries. It seems here that John adopts these as much as he adopts the lord’s dictates. Late on Christine makes one interjection, and earlier she has some fine reactions to John’s infidelity. Sexually confident but church-going, scorning a Stateside flight and ménage, you can see why she’ll claim what’s hers.
Even if the rationale in the end doesn’t quite convince, it’s detailed and strange enough to make one question if Marber has after all got it right.
A scorching 70-minute version; which in this first-rate revival resonates strikingly over thirty years after it first emerged.
Producer Kim Bromovsky, Casting Director Georgia Topley, Intimacy & Fight Director Yarit Dor, Props Supervisor Aino Teppo, CSM Rosie Fleming, Production Manager Dan Weager, Marketing and PR Mobius, Marketing Anne Dillow, PR Anabelle Mastin-Lee, Photographer Teddy Cavendish, Artwork Designer Studio Doug.
