"King Sex is a wayward monarch," says a character in Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus. That is clearly the theme of the plays in the Peter Hall Company's Bath season. But I find the frantic upheavals of sex are far more intriguingly explored in Hall's production of Bennett's 1973 farce than in yet another revival of Strindberg's 1888 tragedy.
Bennett's play deserves to be much better known than it is. It is radical in that, shedding doors and furniture, it strips farce down to its bare essentials. Like Frayn and Orton, Bennett shows that the genre can be a vehicle for social comment. Focusing on a randy Hove GP, his neglected wife, spinster sister and hypochondriac son, Bennett suggests that sex is a way of warding off death and compensating for bodily decay. Behind the high jinks lies a peculiar melancholia, as if Aristophanes had been invested with a sense of human transience.
Hall's production expertly balances light and shade. There is a capricious madness about Paul Bentall's falsie-fitter, who mistakenly pummels the amply real breasts of Annette Badland's Mrs Wicksteed, or Edward Bennett's sexually frustrated Canon, who looks as if he may go off at any moment. There is something lugubriously lustful about James Fleet's GP, for whom the human body is "a sagging parcel of vanilla blancmange". And there is a comic sadness about Badland as his wife, lying night after night in the wasted moonlight claiming: "I know now how the Taj Mahal must feel."
Sexual waywardness is also at the heart of Miss Julie, but compared with the Bennett it seems small beer. Much is made in the programme of the fact that Frank McGuinness's translation relocates the play to 19th-century Northern Ireland. But this doesn't come out strongly in Rachel O'Riordan's production. Richard Dormer's Jean and Pauline Turner's Kristin have an Irish ring but Andrea Riseborough, though suitably provocative as Miss Julie, doesn't instantly convey the hauteur of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.
I suspect there are two ways to revivify Strindberg's play. One is to direct it, as Ingmar Bergman did, as a specifically Swedish play in which erotic frenzy is induced by the white heat of a summer night. The other is to rewrite it, as Patrick Marber did, as a modern play about the intersection of sex and class. Here one has a compromise in which Jean's rearward penetration of Miss Julie is improbably synchronised with off-stage music, giving new meaning to the idea of an Irish jig.
· In rep until August 12. Box office: 01225 448844.
