**

IT is not possible to downplay the literary importance of August Strindberg’s original script, Miss Julie, penned in 1888.

Written by the severe Swede during a period where the upper classes enjoyed much security in their status, Miss Julie drew from the theories of Charles Darwin and Emile Zola, with the resulting motifs being survival of the fittest and the latent power of the poor.

Patrick Marber’s update, After Miss Julie, remains true to these recurring themes. It’s set in a kitchen in 1945. There’s Julie (the rich, dangerously capricious person), Christine (the robustly territorial, subservient person) and John (the belligerent rapist).

Christine, drily played by Amy Cudden, is the moral compass Julie and John discard in a night of frenzied sex that proves the unravelling of the “upstairs, downstairs” relationship , as the two miscreants indulge a passion for one another that appears to stretch back decades. However, owing to a lack of flair in the dialogue between the pair, it is hard to believe it has gone on for hours.

Helen George as Miss Julie delivers her lines in a thin, reedy "evah-so-pawsh" voice so bereft of any original intonation that even once we have seen her in several states of obscene degradation we still find a heavily symbolic act of animal slaughter comical. Blame for this, too, goes to the Van Dyke-esque posturing of Richard Flood as John.

While the set and lighting are of impeccable design, and the velvet grandeur of the Theatre Royal remains an old-school treat, the experience never manages to shake its sixth-form-play feel, even at its darkest.

Done correctly this production ought to be terrifying, but instead we came away cheerfully dismissive and unsullied by Marber’s searing script.