Review | The House Party at Minerva Theatre, Chichester: 'Entertaining and relevant'

A modern reimagining of August Strindberg’s seminal play Miss Julie, Laura Lomas takes the melodramatic emotions and class tensions of the 1888 original and condenses it into the 18th birthday of Julie.

She is a troubled, self-involved girl whose daddy has ditched her to spend the night with his 24-year-old girlfriend, leaving her free to pack his palatial home with bodies, hedonism and a chance to forget.

The only people there who seem to have any meaningful connection with Julie are her best friend Christina and Christina’s boyfriend Jon – who happened to help clean Julie’s house when he was a child and now works for her father.

The play begins with Christina and Julie getting ready before the revellers descend, talking about how they plan to travel to Thailand.

But Christina is hiding a secret – she has an interview for Cambridge in the morning which would scupper their plans.

As the night wears on, Julie unravels as the booze flows, making increasingly destructive choices as Christina and Jon are sucked into the black hole.

The staging of the first act is very immersive; audience members feature as guests of the party, invited to sit on sofas and seats around the stage while the performers dance around them.

And with renowned theatre company Frantic Assembly having a hand in the choreography, you knew the party’s dance scenes were going to be good.

In the original, Julie is the main character – but this version beefs up the role of Christina and turns it into a proper three-hander.

Bafta nominee and The Responder star Josh Finan fizzed with Jon’s nervous energy, mixed with a humble charm that made his cutting remarks towards Julie sting all the more.

Rachelle Diedericks was mesmerising when she brought out the quiet strength of Christina - but when there is what should be a devastating revelation, her reaction felt oddly one-note.And Nadia Parkes as Julie ran the whole gamut of emotions and she fleshed out her anti-heroine, making you hate and pity her in the turn of a sentence.

Not everything worked; one audience partygoer who was milking the laughs threatened to upstage the actors, and a scene where former cleaner Jon repeatedly sprays bleach to scrub clean his literal and moral indiscretions with Julie was a bit on the nose – rewarded with laughs where there should have been silence.

But the second act, scaled down in space (a whole kitchen staged on what was Julie’s kitchen island) and time (just 20 minutes) was a tantalising epilogue that turned the harrowing ending of the first act on its head – showing how the characters have grown beyond their teenage troubles and with 10 years of adulthood under their belts.

An entertaining and relevant adaptation.

Until Saturday, June 1.