Kirby is Crown jewel in lacklustre Julie
Julie National Theatre
★★★★★
Alas, poor Vanessa Kirby. So superb as Princess Margaret in gilded Netflix hit The Crown, where she has captured to Baftawinning perfection the playfulness and pathos of a royal caught between stifling duty, Sixties London and forbidden devotion, this should have been her big moment of status-enhanced theatrical triumph.
She’s a shoo-in for Strindberg’s tragic, privileged anti-heroine Miss Julie, who fatefully descends belowstairs to lure Jean, her father’s chauffeur, away from the latter’s fiancée, Kristina, in a moment of reckless midsummer hedonism.
And in many ways, as she swigs vodka, puffs ciggies, snorts coke and tugs at your heartstrings as the rich girl lost in a mess somewhat (but not entirely) of her own making, Kirby’s Julie is reason enough to dash to the Nash. Yet it’s hard to get much enthused about this new version by Polly Stenham, which attempts to augment the sexual abandon with a frisson of racial tension.
The initially reluctant object of Julie’s desire is a well-heeled, hardworking black Londoner. Nothing wrong with this reading – it provided the electrifying core of Yael Farber’s superior which shifted the action to South Africa. Yet Stenham’s excavation of cultural difference feels curiously cursory – and given a modern metropolitan context in which implicitly anything goes, the sense of societal transgression piling in on top of psychological flaws is lacking.
There should be all kinds of knife-edge power-play going on as the couple engage in a dangerous pas de deux, but for much of the brisk, brief evening, the mistress of the house holds her own, draws the eye, while Eric Kofi-abrefa’s handsome, butch, quietly intelligent and unusually nice Jean merges into the background.
Director Carrie Cracknell and designer Tom Scutt lavish the Lyttelton stage with the sort of palatial basement kitchen that would have annoyed the neighbours to install and a protracted opening party scene of thudding techno calculated to give everyone a headache. Kirby cavorts among the ravers, poses regally on a ramp. Yet the birthday girl has a death wish as she sidles into the domestic sphere, perches on the vast kitchen table, hitches up her silver silk skirt and tries to distract herself – bored, prowling, frustrated.
By turns flirty and growling commands, Kirby capably suggests a vulnerable, abrasive, damaged soul – now into her 30s. “I don’t feel you know how to read people,” Jean observes – and in that shrewd, throwaway line you realise why Julie seems to require chemical assistance to make sense of the world, and why, unable to do so, she will finally reach for more pills to escape it for good.
It’s no right royal let-down then, and Thalissa Teixeira’s Kristina is memorably dignified as she stands and delivers a coolly savage indictment of Julie’s toxic tendency to grab everything. Yet it doesn’t dig deep enough, make you care enough. And the scene in which the couple, having planned a getaway, slaughter her beloved bird, is botched – they use a blender, prompting revolted titters.
Ardent Crown-ists, and those who’ve not seen the play before, may be well enough served. Those already familiar with it, though, can give this Julie a miss.
Until Sept 8. Tickets: 0207 452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk