What I find most unsettling about Strindberg’s Miss Julie these days is no longer the play itself, but that it remains one of the most frequently produced plays in the Western canon, a status that feels increasingly difficult to justify. Especially when, in the preface, Strindberg a well-documented misogynist openly articulates his hostility toward women, and feminists in particular, describing Julie as a degenerate product of emancipation, bound to self-destruct. Knowing this, one is left wondering why theatres keep returning to this text, and what is still being sought or defended in bringing it back to the stage.
Knowing that, I had hoped Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie might reframe or redeem the problematic source or do for Strindberg what Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 did for Ibsen: extend the conversation rather than simply repeat it. The idea of resetting the story on the day of Britain’s 1945 post-war Labour victory when the country was imagining a new social consensus is intriguing on paper. Unfortunately, this production neither rehabilitates the original’s issues nor builds a compelling new argument of its own.
The stakes felt off for both main characters. The writing simplifies a story that in its best iterations carries real subtext and psychological friction, stripping it down to literal cruelty. What should have been an intense power play between Julie and John comes off as blunt and, at times, gratuitously shocking without depth. Instead of a nuanced collision of class, desire, and social change, we get moments of cruelty that feel superficial rather than revelatory.
Designer Eleanor Winter’s set and costumes are impeccable and deserve genuine praise the 1945 period is vivid and consistent, and the theatre-in-the-round staging is well realised. But beyond that, there’s little here that lingers. Charlene Boyd’s Christine is convincingly grounded; she brings an honesty and solidity the other performances struggle to find. By contrast, Liz Francis’s Julie lacks the gravitas needed to anchor her self-destructive arc, and Tom Varey’s John starts with potential but never quite convinces as either predator or lover.
I left feeling that this production by Dadiow Lin was too clean, oddly tidy for a story about devouring passion and disorder and too unwilling to excavate the messy emotional complexity that the original promises, but here fails to deliver.
Reviewer: Klervi Gavet
Reviewed: 13th February 2026
North West End UK Rating: