www.RICHARDCOYLE.com

"Night of guilty pleasures"

Love and marriage, as Frank Sinatra once memorably informed us, go together like a horse and carriage. And so, too, do August Strindberg and Patrick Marber, though there is precious little romance in the air in After Miss Julie, just lashings of sex, violence and class hatred. I need hardly add that I loved this show.

Marber first adapted Strindberg's thrillingly intemperate account of sex across the class divide for television in 1995, just before he wrote his big hit Closer, an account of the tortuous love affairs and infidelities of four present-day Londoners. Closer has been described as an updated version of Coward's Private Lives given a bitter late-20th-century twist. But, in its bruising sexual confrontations and keen awareness of the way love and desire can so easily corrode into jealousy and hatred, it was clear that Marber also had a great deal in common with Strindberg.

In a note to his version of Miss Julie, Marber writes: "At times I have been unfaithful to the original, but always conscious that infidelity might be an act of love."

That love shines through in this electrifying stage version, blazingly directed by Michael Grandage, and so too does a keen dramatic intelligence. Miss Julie has never seemed more relevant, or more resonant.

The action of Strindberg's "naturalistic tragedy" is set on a Swedish estate during a heady midsummer night. In Marber's version, the action has been shifted to the estate of an English socialist peer on the night of Labour's landslide election victory in 1945.

While Miss Julie's father celebrates Labour's success in London and his servants enjoy a boozy dance in the barn, Miss Julie seeks out her father's chauffeur, John, in the kitchen, beautifully realised in Bunny Christie's meticulously detailed design.

The Labour landslide gives an added piquancy to this account of a transgressive one-night stand. For here we are in an upstairs-downstairs world in which nothing seems to have changed since the previous century, despite his Lordship's socialism. John and his fiancee Christine, the cook (excellent Helen Baxendale), stand to attention when Miss Julie enters, light her cigarettes for her, and speak to her with studied deference.

Miss Julie, with her cut-glass accent and air of long-bred superiority, seems like a creature from a more exotic planet in the drab kitchen, but the sexual tension that crackles between her and John when Christine falls asleep is manifest and leads inevitably to the bedroom.

Marber is far more frank than Strindberg could ever be about their night of passion. When Miss Julie starts putting on airs the following morning and screams, "Stand up when you speak to me. Remember your position!", John replies with unforgettable insolence: "Which one, Madame? There were so many."

Kelly Reilly brilliantly captures the spoilt hauteur and louche sensuality of Miss Julie, but, as she faces the prospect of public shame, she also makes you feel genuine concern for this sexually voracious yet emotionally frigid woman, driven to the point of no return by her passion and her class. There is a trembling, barely contained hysteria in Reilly's performance as she fluctuates between desperate panic, impossible dreams and ludicrously inappropriate hauteur that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Richard Coyle's John matches her every step of the way in this fatal dance of desire, moving from deference to stinging insults and an eye to the main chance before the summons of his master's bell reduces him once again to cringing subservience.

Together the pair create an atmosphere of violent and depraved sexuality that is deeply and disturbingly erotic. An unforgettable night of white-hot theatrical intensity.