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England itself was the main subject this week, with the celebration of a Labour Party landslide in 1945 and a look at life under Mrs Thatcher in the late Eighties. Two of our best contemporary dramatists - Patrick Marber and David Hare - were revisiting the past in different ways; Marber by re-writing August Strindberg's 1888 classic Miss Julie, and Hare by reviving his own play of exactly 100 years later.

In After Miss Julie, the chauffeur downs a glass of wine in the kitchen. He says it is just like Winston Churchill: 'Robust, well rounded. . . and finished.'Patrick Marber's version of Strindberg was first seen on television eight years ago. Newly re-written and brilliantly cast, Michael Grandage's stage premiere is a complete knock-out.

The updating works two ways. It fits the new social conditions like a glove. And it unleashes the barbaric power of Strindberg's original.

This week's Evening Standard Drama Awards came far too early in the year. Admittedly, the Donmar scooped two of them, but Kelly Reilly's performance in After Miss Julie might have entered the lists in a more sensible dispensation.

Just 26, and looking younger, Miss Reilly has already made a West End impression in The Graduate and Sexual Perversity In Chicago. Her account of sexual perversity in the shires as the slinky, aristocratic Miss Julie is both tragic and heartbreaking without softening the spoilt brat element in the role.

Julie's affair with the valet in Strindberg is triggered by the Midsummer Eve's orgiastic party. Here, the social stays are loosened by election night euphoria. Richard Coyle's superb, watchful John doesn't know what has hit him. And he responds with a sudden lunge across the kitchen table. Their carnal encounter, with class hatred on both sides, happens offstage. But the huge basement kitchen is immersed in the slow, painful build-up and disastrous aftermath.

Helen Baxendale's demure Yorkshire cook witnesses the carnage with the steely moral purpose of the new post-War age of rationing and austerity. Her performance, like the other two, is faultless.