BWW Reviews: ABOUT MISS JULIE, King's Head Theatre, July 3 2014

Below stairs, Christina (Suzanne Shaw) is rounding off a long day's cooking and cleaning when her betrothed, John (Jonathan Sidgwick), arrives from serving at the house party above. The domestic staff eat and talk of their own domestic arrangements: an everyday scene fractured when two becomes three with the Master's daughter, Miss Julie (Sophie Linfield) turning up tipsy to demand a dance with John. The recently concluded Great War casts its shadow over all three, as talk soon turns to action and to inevitable consequences.

Sidgwick's adaptation moves Strindberg's play 35 years forward and to London, a conceit that works brilliantly. Shaw plays Christina as a former suffragette (a political position that cuts across the class divide to give her some kinship with Miss Julie) a woman who has done the right thing in waiting for her man to return from the trenches, and is betting her life that he'll do the right thing too. It is a beautifully understated performance that bubbles and eventually boils over..

Sidgwick brokers the butler's autodidactic cleverness into both the charm he uses to fascinate Miss Julie and the engine that fires his social aspirations. In a very effective twist on the conventional narrative of 1914-18, he has come out of the trenches with vim and confidence, speaking French and unwilling to kowtow to his superiors, knowing them to be flesh and blood like him. Christina's war on the home front, especially her fight for Votes for Women, has wrought much more damage on her. Sidgwick walks a tightrope between caricature uppity Yorkshireman and genuine socialist reformer willing to risk all to get what he believe he deserves. From this tension in John's thinking flows much of the dark comedy that weaves in and out of the play.

If Sidgwick and Shaw are good in their roles (and they are) Linfield is sensational as Miss Julie, her aching desire for excitement written in her every coquettish look, her every flung insult, her uber-feminine clothes (Beatriz Lopez has done a very fine job there). Long before we learn the story of Miss Julie, we have to believe in her as something more than a nymphomaniac lush, we have to see a real woman, not just a cypher - and we do. When she reveals her helplessness in the face of her cruel upbringing, the villain becomes victim and the drama's conclusion even more ambiguous.

Delivered all-through in 80 minutes, this is a gem of a play, faultless in the ambition of its conception and quality of its execution. All proceeds from this Residence Theatre Company production go towards the Jan Taylor Memorial Fund which aims to nurture new talent in British theatre. If it nurtures anything half as good as this, it will have delivered on its mission.

About Miss Julie continues at the King's Head until 26 July.

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