Staying afloat in a sea of emotion

MISS JULIE

(Royal Exchange, Manchester)

THIS Royal Exchange revival promised treats — a theatre favourite, Maxine Peake, in the title role and a strong female director, Sarah Frankcom, among them.

Strindberg’s naturalistic 1888, short, sharp shock to the Swedish theatregoing masses was a controversial hotbed of sex and sensuality in its day, and has been a tough nut to crack ever since.

It is rare to see it done with any great sense of the realism Strindberg desired and the playwright, a misogynist with paranoid anxieties, pumped a lot of his own personality into it, which means it remains some distance from realism at times.

Julie is the wild, half free-spirit, half man-hating daughter of the house, living it up with the servants while her father, the count, is away.

She and slightly older servant Jean have a brief fling after much flirting on her part and she loses the upper hand. She wants to leave, to escape potential shame, he wants then to run away and open an hotel in Switzerland.

The arguments and balance of power go back and forth, not terribly convincingly, until Jean pushes the shamed Julie into doing the indecent thing — killing herself.

Some of this over-emotional turmoil is absolved in David Eldridge’s new “version” of the play, which effectively redramatises a literal new translation of Strindberg’s Swedish, making it fresher and more direct than the language of the original.

But bringing some of the language up to date merely shows the play for what it is: a confusing, 100-minute classic whose supposed emotional and psychological accuracy is cover for often wild leaps of logic and motivation.

Frankcom’s direction is clear and uncluttered, as is the set — pretty much a central kitchen table and little else — which allow the text to do what it can.

This production, oddly gives the lion’s share of stage time to the quiet authority of Joe Armstrong as Jean, rather than Maxine Peake — which unbalances the weight of Julie’s plight.

Maxine Peake isn’t perhaps a natural choice to play the haughty, neurotic Julie, but does so with believable tension — where the dialogue is believable.

She and Armstrong — with Carla Henry as minor character Kristin — create an almost believable, closed-in world of sensuality and class divide. Almost.