MISS JULIE. To 11 May.

Bolton

MISS JULIE
by August Strindberg, version by Frank McGuinness

Octagon Theatre To 11 May 2002
7.30 Mat Sat 4,11 May 2pm
Runs 2hr No interval

TICKETS 01204 520661
Review Timothy Ramsden 20 April

The sides in Strindberg's sex war come across with different force.'Starring Emmerdale's Anna Brecon and Jeff Hordley' says the Bolton production flyer. The old Scandinavian misogynist would be chirruping in his grave to know that his work was held worth the time of today's TV soap stars.

Their impact's wide apart. Hordley's Jean, the aspiring footman, is a straight-backed, mastering figure who with a slight sinking around the knees and a flicker of distress on the face turns instantly into a cringing servant when summoned by his Master's bell.

Hordley's strong features emphasise Jean's sexual magnetism to Julie, though his brisk manner also makes clear he has the worker's practicality in his plans for their future. Brecon's young lady of the house is, by contrast, impractical and fanciful, very much relying on a security built entirely on her social position.

Airily imprecise, dumbfounded when she discovers the complexities of life for the non-privileged, Julie descends from the commanding person tripping down Patrick Connellan's steep stairway to the servants' quarters, to become the near-traumatised figure ascending sad and trance-like to the inevitable ending of her life.

Except that, between these moments, this Miss has suggested little more than an expensively brought up, rather spoilt gal, with cut-glass accent, disturbed by the likes of a table-arrangement mucked up before a dinner-party. Her confident early taunting of the servant she fancies and later, post-coital panic are little more than fun and inconvenience respectably.

When, in her final desperation, she repeats Jean's earlier plan – now clearly impractical - to flee and open a hotel in Switzerland to Kristin, as if it were her own idea, there's little sense of a woman whose sexual adventure has brought her world crashing around her, and destroyed her will. The account of her parents' disastrous marriage lacks any sense of her childhood having fuelled her intense mn-hatred.

Tracey Moore's Kristin has the measure of Jean, knowing when to react affectionately and when to ignore his pretensions. Yet she doesn't convince she lives the stern Calvinism that emerges in her last intervention.

Connellan's deep-sunk kitchen, with the look of a laboratory or operating-theatre, provides a fine environment for the play. Strindberg would have liked that.

Miss Julie: Anna Brecon
Jean: Jeff Hordley
Kristin: Tracey Moore

Director: Mark Babych
Designer: Patrick Connellan
Lighting: Tom Weir
Sound: Andy Smith
Composer: Conrad Nelson

2002-04-24 03:04:51