August Strindberg’s Miss Julie may be approaching 140 years old, but it’s themes of sex, misogyny and class remain timeless. Laura Lomas’ The House Party brings this right up to the modern age, dialling up the sex but leaving class – or more specifically money – as an undercurrent throughout
Julie (Synnøve Karlsen) is turning 18, her dad has skipped their evening plans to spend the evening with his 24-year-old girlfriend, so Julie throws a house party. Aided by best friend Christine (Sesley Hope) she anxiously awaits any of her guests to arrive. Director Holly Race Roughan has them arrive in full on Frantic Assembly style, slickly choreographed dance, leaps and dips and a flurry of youthful movement to an energetic beat.
Without the traditional servant role to tell us how the characters relate to each other we learn a lot about the relationships by what the characters keep secret. Christine has an interview to attend Cambridge in the morning, but she has not told Julie about this at all and is planning to simply leave the party early. She’s waiting for her boyfriend Jon (Tom Lewis) to arrive, and he’ll then drive her home later.
The three young leads deliver engaging and nuanced performances, Karlsen shows enough depth underneath Julie’s entitlement to let us understand her at least a little and show vulnerability. Lewis’ Jon leans into the tension and slowly shows us how his long held attraction to Julie comes to the surface in response to her calculated and deliberate temptations. Hope convincingly sells the friendship Christine has with Julie, letting us go with it even when we may want to question why the two are so close.
The story remains centred in the kitchen, even as the party rages around the house, with music thumping in the background. This modern, minimalist space features a ticking clock inevitably suggesting to us a countdown to trouble – and large windows at the back that not only reflect the cast but also transform into a lightbox, allowing more of Frantic Assembly’s physicality to underscore the action in front.
The staging is particularly striking in a scene where Jon, who once helped his mother clean Julie’s house as a child, reaches for cleaning materials to repeatedly scrub the spot where he and Julie just had sex – if only we could clean up our lives and the way we feel we have stained them so easily.
If you are familiar with the original play, you may be surprised when The House Party does not end where expected. Instead, it leaps forward ten years, revealing the consequences of that fateful night and how the relationships played out after a night of betrayal and cruelty.
In addition to the misogyny, Lomas adds an undercurrent of voyeurism and revenge porn, a nude photograph of Julie has been widely shared, a video of her and Jon is shared online within seconds. While staying true to the original themes, Lomas has done a superb job of modernising the play, expanding on the issues and showing how they can be experienced in new and relevant ways today.
The House Party will perform at the Rose Theatre until March 22nd, and tours around the UK until 10th May.
Reviewer: Dave Smith
Reviewed: 7th March 2025
North West End UK Rating:
Rating: 4 out of 5.
