A radically reimagined version of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie shows at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre this month. Directed by Holly Race Roughan and written by Laura Lomas, The House Party is set in modern times and explores themes of class, power and privilege. 
Holly and Laura spoke to What’s On about their critically acclaimed play...

August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie has been reimagined 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 changes their lives forever.

As artistic director of Headlong Theatre, which has produced The House Party along with Frantic Assembly and Chichester Festival Theatre, Holly says it was essential that the story spoke to modern audiences and made 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 contemporise 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 that it’s so balanced; you can’t really come down on one side. Who’s the victim and who’s 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. 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 last year, one of the great joys for the creative team was seeing how it appealed to people of all ages but especially younger audience members.

“We were quite knocked out by the reaction from different generations. 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 - as well as 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 of her version, but also to give it a greater relevance and modern-day resonance.

“Strindberg is so immediate,” she says. “Dramatically, it grabs you by the throat and never stops. The challenge in trying to make it contemporary is being able to update it while also holding onto that propulsive drama.

“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’ve 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. There’s 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 - something of which show director Holly is very aware: “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. All three of us felt deeply proud of the show last year. We felt we had surpassed what we could do without each other.”

The House Party shows at The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, from Thursday 8 to Saturday 10 May