Miss Julie: Old power play brought up to date at Perth

It’s the 1920s in Scotland, and the General Strike has seen His Lordship’s millworkers call off work until their conditions improve. So bold are they, in fact, that they’ve taken to partying in the estate’s barn while their employer is away in talks to resolve the strike.

Meanwhile, respectable and hard-working cook Christine is still dutifully grafting away in the kitchen of the Laird’s house, not convinced by the reasoning of the strike itself. She believes the workers will lose and return to even worse conditions, if they have a job at all.

Her colleague, the Laird’s handyman John, is less troubled by the upheaval, wearing the swagger of the estate’s alpha male and the Laird’s favourite servant. He and Christine appear to be in the midst of a friendly but non-sexual engagement, even as his staglike behaviour is like a beacon for the Laird’s daughter Julie.

Written more than 130 years ago, Miss Julie works well in the updated setting of Edinburghbased playwright Zinnie Harris’s adaptation. Showing in the smaller studio room, Perth Theatre’s staging is a convincing version with young actors and creatives at its heart.

Under the direction of Shilpa T-Hyland, Hiftu Quasem’s Julie is particularly memorable, shifting between the bossiness and almost sadistic privilege of her position and the adrift fear and inexperience of youth. Helen Mackay’s Christine is reserved, stifling her emotions, while Lorn Macdonald’s John is just a bit too cocky to be likeable.

It’s a play filled with sex, scandal and convincing period soap operatics, but just below the surface it says so much more about how power works between the sexes, the classes, and employer and employee.