To say that Laura Lomas has recast Miss Julie for Gen Z is both accurate and reductive. This loose adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1888 classic play, directed by Headlong’s Artistic Director Holly Race Roughan, is an intelligent update centred on modern class, power and sexual politics.
Strindberg’s play has inspired an impressive list of playwrights. Patrick Marber moved the setting from Midsummer’s Eve to the eve of Labour’s 1945 landslide general election victory while Polly Stenham’s Julie saw her titular socialite celebrating her drug-fuelled 33rd birthday.
Lomas’s version takes the same starting point as Stenham with Julie (Synnøve Karlsen) celebrating her 18th birthday at a hastily arranged party with a one-hundred-person guest list. Her absent father would prefer to spend the evening with his 24-year-old girlfriend. Unlike the original, Julie has been embarrassed not by a broken engagement – though she’s just been dumped by her boyfriend by text message – but by a leaked nude photo.
Julie’s best friend Christine (Sesley Hope) has arrived early, consoling and humouring her in equal measure, and occasionally dodging classist barbs directed towards Christine and her boyfriend Jon (Tom Lewis), whose mother was employed in the house as a cleaner. He too is now employed by the family, working as an intern for Julie’s father, and arrives at the party with the intention of staying only as long as is necessary as he needs to drive Christine to Cambridge for an interview the next morning. Christine hasn’t yet shared the news with Julie; worried about how she will react as it will mean cancelling a planned trip to Thailand.
You feel for the characters, deftly drawn by Lomas and finely acted by the lead trio. Karlsen and Hope are particularly convincing in their portrayal of youthful friendships – tight-knit even if their differences significantly outweigh their commonalities. Scenes are connected by brief flashes of the house party that rages upstairs with performers from the Frantic Assembly theatre company injecting a nervous energy that lingers into action that follows.
Some near-soliloquy-style passages feel slightly apart from the rest of Lomas’s flowing, naturalistic writing and an epilogue that gives us a brief glimpse of the characters a decade later and the impact of that night has had on them offers little real insight. The social analysis is at times superficial in the same way that Julie offers stock political catchphrases like ‘property is theft.’ And though she expertly unpicks the sexual politics at play in how Julie is perceived by her peers and by Jon, there is a sense that there is more here that Lomas wants to say and could say – particularly about class.
Still, despite this, The House Party is a relevant and vibrant update. That it has been written and performed by so many early career theatremakers makes it all the more impressive and all the more exciting.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (Very good)
The House Party is at Leeds Playhouse until 1 March 2025, then touring
