After Miss Julie review, Young Vic: Maria

New Order

After Miss Julie is the fantasy version of Upstairs Downstairs. Miss Julie has a yen for a man in a uniform. That he's Daddy's chauffeur is no barrier. She has the house to herself, a band playing in the barn, and John is in the kitchen being served kidneys on toast by his long-suffering sweetheart, Christine the cook. Miss Julie is in charge and she's high.  When she calls below stairs to demand a dance, propriety flies out of the window.

The kidneys - taken from a working Aga in The Maria studio at the Young Vic - are the first skewered body parts in Patrick Marber's reworking of the Strindberg classic. By the end, hearts and minds are in disarray and everyone's toast. Marber's version is set on the eve of the first Labour government victory in 1945. The upending of the old order is exposed in the coruscating exchanges between John and Julie as the emotional screws are turned. 

Natalie Abrahami's production is beautifully set and lit, incorporating a working kitchen and, at first floor level, a small dance band. At one point, thanks to a brilliant sleight of hand, a live budgie is apparently decapitated. Strindberg's Scandinavian madness is a bit too much for an English setting, but Natalie Dormer and Kieran Bew make a good fist of it, and the scene in which Christine (Polly Frame) discovers her lover's duplicity is deeply moving.

In conclusion: When Julie orders John to dance with her, we know that it is the last dance in which her social class will have dominion over his. As ever though, it is the women who are the victims of an opportunist male. 

References
Dominic Cavendish review in The Daily Telegraph