Miss Julie at Belvoir St Theatre

We love watching plays about couples tearing each other to pieces: George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Elyot and Amanda in Private Lives, Jean and Julie in Miss Julie.

The difference, though, is that Julie is still in her teens. She is rich because her father is rich. Jean is not rich – he works for the family, in a lowly way – but he would quite like to be. They have this much in common: they would both like to rule their own lives, they both think they can get that from each other, and they both think sex is the way to do it.

August Strindberg’s masterpiece has been hovering in the wings at Belvoir for a while now, waiting for the right people: Leticia Cáceres and Brendan Cowell both know how to combine tender and brutal to devastating effect. Simon Stone joins them with a rewrite of the play in the fashion of his The Wild Duck.

This is a red-blooded new Miss Julie about men and power, about extreme privilege, about freedom and about how cruel we can be to each other in the interests of self-preservation.