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During Patrick Marber's brilliant adaptation of Strindberg's 1927 play 'Miss Julie' at the Donmar Theatre, the audience was so sucked into the relentless tension of the piece that gasps of astonishment were audible on several occasions. Such is the sense of reality of this, one of Strindberg's best known plays, in Marber's updated version. His alterations of time and place are very clever. Marber converts the joyful atmosphere of mid-summer's day, a Scandinavian festival, into the euphoria felt by the workers and their supports in Britain in 1945 when Labour was elected into power, defeating Churchill and the Tories.

Miss Julie's father, the landowning Count of the original, becomes a rich Labour peer, what we would today call a champagne Socialist. Miss Julie has had a terrible childhood. Her mother was a bonkers feminist, the sort who forces the male farm workers to do the women's work and visa versa. Her father was better on the theory than the practice and ignored both the labourers whom he really abhorred and his daughter whom he wasn't very interested in. Britain is changing, but Miss Julie, the chauffeur and the cook are stuck in a pre-war world.

The cast of three, Helen Baxendale as the cook Christine, Richard Coyle as John the chauffeur, and Kelly Reilly as the damaged Miss Julie, bring a searing realism full of nuance and insights to their roles that could not be bettered. Reilly's tempting languid sex kitten who tries so hard to lure John away from his fiancée, the cook, is both delicious and deeply scary. Helen Baxendale, such a handsome woman, brings a quiet frustrated dignity to the socially repressed cook who is in no way a push-over. Richard Coyle is the tempted man who in the end doesn't want his boat rocked. Who would run away with a women who truly believes, "We don't need money. We'll be together"? The classes were much more divided in 1945. If you wanted to change your station in life, you had to leave the country. In Marber's version, they are not going to Switzerland, but to New York to start a night-club. With no money! In the end, John comes to his senses and realises that the status quo is where his security lies. Not to mention, it becomes increasingly clear to him that Miss Julie is quite mad.

Michael Grandage is such a fine director. Every nuance and every gesture contains power. Round and round the big kitchen table prowl Miss Julie and John, stalking each other alternately. The sense of menace is overwhelming. The evocative set is by Bunny Christie as are the wonderful clothes.

The programme notes ponder why history has not bestowed on Strindberg the kind of recognition it has granted both his major contemporaries, Ibsen and Chekhov. This is not too difficult to work out. Firstly, Miss Julie is a very short play at only one and a half hours, no interval. Most of Strindberg's plays, and he wrote over 50 of them, are interminably long. Also, Strindberg was obsessed about the relationship of the sexes, and can be fairly interpreted as more than a bit of a misogynist. This of course, depends on the playing, which Marber's writing and this production overcome. The motivation and inner turmoil of the three characters are both accessible and understandable. To paraphrase P. T. Barnum the American Circus impresario, "You can depress some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time". Strindberg's level of tense gloom in all his plays is overwhelming.

All playwrights come in and out of fashion, however. Eugene O'Neill on whom Strindberg had a great influence and Strindberg are both being performed at the National Theatre this season, 'Mourning Becomes Electra' and 'A Dream Play' respectively. Marber, by placing Miss Julie in 1945, has brought the work up to date.

The performances and the production make it an outstanding evening at the Donmar. Don't miss it.