Miss Julie through the ages: the many faces of Strindberg’s masterpiece

Unsurprisingly, such an unabashed approach to sex meant there was a lot of nervousness about staging Miss Julie, especially after its publication in Sweden had been met with a hostile reception.

Reviewers called it “totally repellent” and “a heap of ordure”. Having been banned from public performance in Sweden, Strindberg managed to produce it privately at the Copenhagen University Student Union in 1889 in front of an audience of 150 students.

It would be another 17 years before it was seen in Stockholm. Meyer writes: “As in A Doll’s House, the audience found itself hearing things said that they knew to be true but that had never been said in a theatre before.”

But the critics acclaimed it, while the audience applauded loudly at the end. Finally, Strindberg’s provocation was vindicated.

‘Before Strindberg, sex in drama is something in which only married or wicked people indulge’

Production in London was also prohibited by the censor, despite enthusiastic support from fellow writers, notably George Bernard Shaw, for whom Strindberg staged a one-off performance in Stockholm in 1908.

The play’s first appearance in London was at the Arts Theatre, then run as a membership-only club, in 1929.

One of the most successful reinventions is Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie, which relocates the drama to an English country house on the eve of the Labour Party’s landslide election victory in 1945.

Written for TV in 1995, After Miss Julie was adapted for the stage by Marber in 2003, and has since been revived many times.

Reviewing the original in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer called it “electrifying... an unforgettable night of white-hot theatrical intensity”, while the Guardian’s Michael Billington wrote: “The real virtue of Marber’s version is that it refreshes an old play and reminds us that it is as much about psychological disintegration as the never ending sex and class wars.”

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An even bolder relocation takes place in Farber’s Mies Julie, in which an aristocratic white woman has sex with a black manservant in South Africa’s Western Cape on Freedom Day, commemorating the end of apartheid. In addition to Strindberg’s class and gender stand-off, there is the weight of colonial oppression and racial inequality hanging over the couple as they negotiate their mutual attraction.

Similarly, Miss Julie: Freedom Summer (2009), a reworking by the Canadian Stage Company, is set in Mississippi in 1964, at the height of the civil rights movement. It contrasts the life of an entitled Southern belle with an increasingly politicised yet powerless black chauffeur. Against a background of protests, the murder of three civil rights activists and a sweaty summer’s night, the stakes for the ill-starred lovers could scarcely be higher.

Clearly, Strindberg tapped into a timeless and universal truth – that you can be sexually attracted to someone for whom you have no respect and little in common. He was also a self-confessed misogynist who opposed the emancipation of women. How has Lomas addressed this in her version of Miss Julie?

She says: “I thought it was really important to unpick it, how Julie constructs, or fails to construct, a sense of self-esteem in the context of the misogyny around her. I think we’re interested now in the psychological motivation of the characters, their internal struggles. I want people to come away from it with compassion for Julie.”

The House Party runs at Chichester Festival Theatre from May 3. For full details click here