Hot passion and a bowl of tasty kidneys!

Miss Julie (Jermyn Street) Verdict: Strindberg up close FOUR decades before D.H. Lawrence wrote about gamekeeper Mellors bagging Lady Chatterley, Swedish playwright August Strindberg came up with his story of an Earl’s daughter having a morganatic hot-pash for her father’s valet. Miss Julie, long one of the staples of western theatre, has now been given a respectful adaptation by Howard Brenton and it is on at the tiny, resurgent Jermyn Street Theatre. You are so close to the action at the Jermyn Street that the quality of acting matters — and it has not always been high enough in recent years. New artistic director Tom Littler seems to be getting to grips with that and if the Jermyn Street can hold on to him, it could be in for a golden patch. This production, which started life in Keswick, is faithful to the period and opens with a beautifully paced passage of silence when Kristin the cook sets to her stove in the house owned by the Earl. Izabella Urbanowicz is excellent as doughty, decent Kristin. The smell of the kidneys she cooked for her fiance, Jean the valet, made me peckish. James Sheldon’s Jean is perhaps not cadaverous or dangerous enough but he achieves a certain chemistry with Charlotte Hamblin’s flighty Julie. A moment when Jean kisses Julie’s bared ankle has real erotic charge. I wish I believed more in Mr Sheldon as a 19th-century servant. Vocally, he is too modern. All the usual class heartache is here and Mr Brenton takes care to include the point that Kristin wants her upper-class masters to be moral so that she has a reason to try to better herself. Only a few times are there wobbles in Mr Littler’s direction. When Jean dons a bowler hat, he looks dangerously like Stan Laurel. And there are a couple of moments when Miss Hamblin’s hysterics feel forced and over-rehearsed. Otherwise, this is a serious and thought-stirring rendition.