www.RICHARDCOYLE.com

In the first half of Patrick Marber's After Miss Julie, each moment is so powerful you sit there in love with the production, the play, the Donmar, with theatre itself. The side light gleaming on the crockery in the kitchen. How Miss Julie enters and stands, her red-and-white dress clinging gorgeously to her slender waist and hips. The explosive episode when she tells John to kiss her foot (in its silver-look shoe).

In his 1888 Miss Julie, where the upper-class heroine screws her father's valet and finds she has signed her own death warrant, Strindberg brutally tore apart the safety knot in which class, gender, sex, and life itself were tied together. Marber brings that home to us by moving it from the Swedish midsummer eve setting - After Miss Julie occurs on the night of the 1945 election victory. Marvellously, in Michael Grandage's production, there are times when the play seems timeless. This might be 1888 or 2003.

But a different sad truth emerges as Marber's lovingly unfaithful version develops: in 1945, England was almost the only place in the west where class transgression might be a matter of social disgrace. If only she were an American runaway heroine! So you end up feeling sorrier for class-ridden England than for Miss Julie.

Marber's version is acute in every liberty it takes. For example: John: "Christ, I despise religion." Julie: "Then why practise it? Class is your religion." But he doesn't give his heroine the sudden pathos that Strindberg's has as she wishes she had any religious faith, or her sudden blind authority as she says: "I can't feel anything, I can't repent, can't run away, can't stay, can't live can't die."

Michael Grandage's production - though I think After Miss Julie might have more force if it were played with the loaded rhythmic tension of Pinter or Mamet - is utterly engrossing in its way. Kelly Reilly's classy little nymphet Julie is an unfolding amazement, engrossing even as she grows more maddening, more crazed.

Helen Baxendale, slightly tense on opening night, could be a perfect Christine, beautiful but choked-up. Marber's John is less ruthlessly aggressive than Strindberg's Jean; Richard Coyle makes him very reasonable and very real.