It is midsummer eve, madness is in the air. Julie, the aristocratic daughter of the count, is in a dangerous mood, flirting with the servants.
"You can get burned playing with fire," warns Jean, her father's valet and the object of her attentions.
"Not me," she replies, "I'm insured." But the premiums are worthless, and when Julie mates with Jean like a bitch on heat, the result is an emotional inferno.
Michael Boyd recently directed a very different kind of summer madness, with the sexiest A Midsummer Night's Dream that we have seen for years. This evening could do with some of that production's erotic charge.
August Strindberg knew all about the sexual thrill of power and the lure of the masochist for the sadist, long before Hollywood got round to making films such as 9 Weeks.
In Miss Julie it is a short step from ordering your foot to be kissed to discovering that the boot is on the other foot. There is no better drama about lust and hate. Or for reminding you that you really should not play games unless you are prepared to lose as well as win. It is a pretty nasty 90 minutes. Here it is never really quite nasty enough.
Boyd's production and Frank McGuinness's new translation of Strindberg's play are good on the contempt of the servants who discover that their supposed betters are no better than they should be.
The evening hits full throttle in the scene in which Julie and Jean's offstage coupling is accompanied by the servants' invasion of the kitchen, and an initial threat of violence gives way almost to orgy.
Tom Piper's set also gives symbolic meaning to this most naturalistic of dramas, making full use of the height of the stage and dominated by a twisting staircase that spirals ever downwards as if the steaming kitchen really were located in the bowels of hell.
But though both Christopher Eccleston as Jean and Aisling O'Sullivan as Julie are watchable, and he plays cleverly on the idea of Jean as a spiv who dreams, you would have to shut your eyes to really believe in either their attraction or repulsion for each other. It is a lack that acts like a fire blanket on an otherwise combustible play.
Until May 27. Box office: 0171-930 8800. This review appeared in some editions of yesterday's Guardian.
