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Strindberg's Miss Julie has been done to death recently. But, by relocating the action to the night of Labour's landslide election victory in 1945, Patrick Marber not only sharpens the social context but restores the original's tragic impact.

In Marber's version Miss Julie, still raw from being jilted by her officer fiance, becomes the daughter of a Labour peer. John, the chauffeur with whom she has a catastophic midsummer night's fling, is torn between obeisance and consciousness of the working-class's new-found power. And Christine, John's fiancee, embodies the kind of gumption that allows her to tolerate her partner's sexual waywardness if not that of her social superior.

You could nitpick over some of Marber's details: since the Labour victory was declared on a Thursday, it seems unlikely that Christine would have been going to church the next morning. And, although there is a good moment when drunken revellers batter on the kitchen's taped-up windows, you feel electoral euphoria might have impinged even more on the action.

But what Marber captures precisely is the way the heroine's hysteria is heightened by the night's tumultuous events. Boyishly reared by an emancipated mother and a suicidal father, she is the victim of heredity, environment and her own anachronistic position as an outsider in the new socialist England.
It is the sense of Miss Julie as a lost soul that is beautifully caught in Kelly Reilly's astonishing performance. She saunters arrogantly into the servant's quarters and even makes a toast to the workers sound like a mocking sexual invitation. But, in the post-coital scenes, Reilly's splayed fingers and inturned toes suggest a woman ill at ease not only in her own body but in her current social limbo. For once the heroine's suicide seems inevitable rather than willed.

Michael Grandage's production also gains enormously from the accuracy of Bunny Christie's farmhouse kitchen where even the labelled bells remind you of the survival of the caste-system. And, while Richard Coyle captures exactly John's mixture of swagger and servitude, Helen Baxendale exudes a lifetime's drudgery as his put-upon fiancee. But the real virtue of Marber's version is that it refreshes an old play and reminds us that it is as much about psychological disintegration as the never-ending sex and class wars.

**** (Rated 4 stars out of 5)