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"Julie, do you want me? A brilliant reworking of Miss Julie revives the play."

Part voyeuristic body-ripper, part angry class-warfare. At one instant slow and domestic; at the next, full of hysterical flights. It's not easy to make Miss Julie work on the stage. But the Donmar has found a way. Patrick Marber has done Strindberg and the stage a big favour by supplying a fundamental reimagining of Strindberg's play. And Michael Grandage has given it a fiercely attentive, magnetic production.

The basic plot remains. One heady night, an upper-class young woman has a fling with a manservant that destroys her. But Marber has moved the play from nineteenth-century Sweden to England in 1945, and the night of the Labour Party's election victory. In doing so, he has clarified the action (things go a bit foggy, especially in the sex area, in the original), and tightly focused the social relations.

The man's fiancée who circles the action, watching on with sour pragmatism, looks here like a new kind of female and a new kind of working class - well capable of running things if she's really going to get power. Even in a pinny, Helen Baxendale looks more like a Vogue cover than a drudge, but she powerfully projects the shrewdness, the composure and realism that will cause her pain but give her strength.

Marber has cut some dull bits of back-plot, and added some wit of his own: the play loses none of its darkness for being made more springy and astringent.

There will always be some things that don't exactly add up: why exactly do the one-night-standers feel so shamed? Is a bloody end really inevitable? But new kinds of sense emerge in this version, where all three characters are caught in an old system with the possibility of change dangled elusively before them. And it's the brilliance of Grandage's production to transmit emotions so hugely in excess of the facts and of reason that the action of the play seems to have a lunar logic of its own, and the changes of temperature to follow a hidden pulse: moving in a second from the deliberate to the wild and hectic.

Bunny Christie's meticulous period kitchen - with its painted brick walls, its small jug of flowers, its table with brass-handled drawers - is solid, well-ordered. It's the fitting arena for those long passages where Baxendale is peacefully alone on stage, smoking, boiling up potions (to make a dog miscarry), arranging her master's boots. And the perfect, unexpected setting for a brutal sexual encounter.

Richard Coyle's manservant is terrific: stealthy and fervent - both attractive and dislikeable. Kelly Reilly gives an amazing portrait of a wounded creature bent on hurting herself still more. Her voice is as clipped as the Queen's was at the same period; she moves as if her limbs were unwelcome, fragile attachments. She suggests someone allergic to herself; someone with neurasthenia wired into her. It suddenly seems pertinent that this landed lady's father committed suicide.