August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie has been re-imagined numerous times since it was first staged in 1888 but when director Holly Race Roughan and writer Laura Lomas approached the story they decided to create a radical new version for audiences today.

Where the original tells of the fall-out of a brief moment of passion across the class divide, The House Party explores the relationships between three teenagers, Julie, her friend Christine and Christine’s boyfriend Jon, and how one night can change their lives for ever.

As Artistic Director of Headlong Theatre, who have produced The House Party along with Frantic Assembly and Chichester Festival Theatre, Holly says it was essential that the story speak to modern audiences and make us hear this classic afresh.

“I think Miss Julie is one of the best plays ever written about the intersection between the personal and the political,” she says. “But I re-read it and realised we needed a new version with more about the psychology and humanity of the characters. Laura was the right person to contemporize it but also complicate it.

“As a production company we are interested in making a version where you feel first for the characters before you then think about them. What is genius about Lomas’ and the Strindberg version is it’s so balanced, you can’t really come down on one side. Who is the victim and the perpetrator? Each page slides you back round the drama triangle.”

The team also decided to give the play its new name The House Party to signify its differences from  Miss Julie.

“I’m really interested at Headlong in estranging audiences from works they think they know really well in order to allow them a contemporary experience of hearing those stories for the first time,” Holly says.

“Having a different name is partly to acknowledge that this is quite a radical new interpretation. It’s so exciting when you don’t know what’s going to happen next when you’re sitting in the theatre. If it’s called The House Party and is based on Miss Julie you know the playground it’s in but you don’t really know what’s going to happen next. That allows us to create experience that feels more like a modern day thriller.”

When the show premiered at Chichester in May 2024, one of the great joys for the creative team was seeing how it appeals to all ages but especially young people.

“We were quite knocked out by the reaction by different generations,” says Holly. “It’s in the mouths of 18-year-olds but it’s an inter-generational theatrical experience.

“Headlong’s place in the theatre ecology is in part, I believe, to be a gateway drug so what really excites me, amongst also playing to brilliant and loyal core audiences, is playing to first timers. What Laura has written is such a tense, exciting show that if it’s your first time going to the theatre you’re going to want to come back.”

In writing The House Party Laura was keen to retain the original play at the heart but adapt it to give it relevance and resonance.

“Strindberg is so immediate, dramatically it grabs you by the throat and never stops,” says Laura whose recent works have included Metamorphoses for The Globe Theatre, Chaos for NT Connections and The Blue Woman for The Royal Opera House.’.

“The challenge in trying to make it contemporary is being able to update it and also hold onto that propulsive drama and make it authentic when the context of today is very different.

“It’s very emotional and there’s something quite teenage and hormonal about that. And so the idea of setting it in a teenage house party arose. Along with that came the idea of making this party really vibrant and anarchic.

“I think it’s a play about friendship and class and it’s about three teenagers who don’t fully understand the external pressures that are bearing down on them and the destructive force of that. So in some ways it’s an awakening or a coming of age for them. But I have also written humour into it so it’s funny and entertaining.”

The friends face the power of external pressures such as social media. “It’s about Julie’s experience of being sexually shamed online so it’s also about misogyny,” says Laura.

“There is a sense that Julie is a bit of a femme fatale in the original and I really wanted to address that in this updating. I wanted us to find a way of understanding Julie as someone who is also marginalised and objectified and acting out of the social violence she has experienced by being told that her only worth is her sexual currency.

“There are so many big intersections in all of the characters so race, gender, class, but there are also smaller intersections which hopefully mean that different people will hook into different things with each of these characters.

“There’s so much going on in the knot between them that your sympathies will shift, but hopefully within that journey you will understand them all.”

The success of The House Party would not have been possible without the collaboration of the three producing partners, Holly adds.

“The production really is a love child of the dynamic movement of Frantic Assembly, Headlong’s commitment to vivid robust thrilling new writing and Chichester’s ‘yes we can’ attitude to producing,” she says. “All three of us felt deeply proud of the show last year and felt we had surpassed what we could do without each other.”

The House Party shows at Belgrade Theatre from The House Party 7-10 May.