Magnificent Miss Julie

It is ages since any London stage was so riven with sexual danger and risk-taking or so steeped in sadomasochistic power-games. As an upper-crust young lady with erotic ideas several rungs beneath her social station Kelly Reilly strips herself psychically bare with a raw thoroughness few young actresses could achieve. The scene of her triumph is this provocative rewriting of a classic.

Patrick Marber has taken valuable liberties with August Strindberg's Miss Julie, that 1888 theatrical despatch from the battle-fields of the sex war. In Strindberg's original a count's daughter defies the rules of class and stoops to conquer her father's handsome young man-servant one midsummer's night.

In Marber's transforming hands, though he has disappointingly rewritten only 30 per cent of the original, the play is updated to 1945 and moved to Britain on 26 July.

The Labour party has just won its first landslide victory and the scene is the country estate of a Labour peer - though few such individuals then existed. Miss Julie, who has danced the night away to a big band, with gardeners and stable lads, after being jilted by an army officer fiancé, steps down to the basement kitchen.

Designer Bunny Christie has created a fine, old period setting though the lighting is far too foggy. Here the estate's chauffeur, John, (the sturdy, not sexy enough Richard Coyle) is entwined with his older lover, Christine, the cook, to whom Helen Baxendale lends an over-generous supply of elegance and class in Michael Grandage's otherwise beautifully judged production.

Unoppressed by drudgery Miss Baxendale's phlegmatic Christine has the unsuitable air of a woman used to eating fine meals, not making them.

The altered, relatively modern perspective supplied by Marber charges Miss Julie with political tension and almost contemporary relevance.

Millions of new voters who had fought in the war hoped Attlee's Labour administration would abandon the rigidities and snobberies of an arthritically class-bound society. Miss Julie and John, who dream of escaping to classless New York, are casualties of this old British order.

Marber's adaptation has a sharp feminist leanings too. It reinforces Strindberg's psychological and sexual points about women who vault the class barrier in pursuit of love, though the partygoers' orgasmic hammering against the kitchenwindows ludicrously parodies Strindberg's midsummer festivities. As early as the Twenties aristocrats married actresses or chorus girls and were not condemned. But titled ladies could not have low-born husbands.

Swaggering loose limbed into view, lips all lurid red, buttocks wiggling and dressed in a scarlet dress with silver shoes and painted nails as accessories, Reilly's magnificent Miss Julie has the throttled, nasal, cawing, bird-like call of the higherflying aristocrat in predatory mode.

The stages of seduction, the sexual teasing and provoking of Coyle's stiff, dour John are electrifyingly written and acted. Julie, whose emotionally retarded condition is over-emphasised, holds out a leg, which she demands the chauffeur should kneel to kiss and then playfully withdraws it .

But once he has bedded her and she emerges sated and vulnerable, John takes the powerful, sadistic upper-hand. "Remember your position," Julie demands in post-sexual anger. "Which one? There were so many," he retorts. The process leading to the girl's masochistic decline and fall assumes a chilling awfulness because so lightly enacted: Strindberg takes on a new lease of theatrical life.