As misogynists go, they don't come more cranky than August Strindberg. Writing in 1888, the Swedish playwright characterised his Miss Julie, the well-bred lady with a passion for a servant, as a "half-woman ... synonymous with corruption". What hope when even your author thinks you a "poor species"?
Not surprisingly, adaptor and director Zinnie Harris approaches sexual politics differently. Shifting the setting forward 40 years, she relocates the play to interwar Scotland at a time of industrial unrest. The midsummer party at which Julie disgraces herself now comes at the end of a nine-week dispute between mill workers and their boss, the young woman's father.
It's the most significant change in a broadly faithful translation, and one that moves the emphasis from gender war to class war. In the eyes of Christine, the servant's virginal fiancee, John's one-night stand with Julie is just as much an affront to the old order as the strike. "You pull all this down, and what are we left with?" she asks, opening the door to the 20th century.
Yet, as Christine, Georgina Sowerby shows great strength, breaking through her Presbyterian restraint to assert the pride of the righteous. "Do you even know when you are talking shit?" she asks Julie with a forcefulness not of Strindberg's design.
Played by Samantha Young in this debut for the National Theatre of Scotland Ensemble, Julie is vulnerable and skittish, torn between the cachet of her breeding and the low status of a woman flirting with a sexually dominant male. Andy Clark's John has the confidence of a man with history on his side, quick to assert his intellectual authority.
Although the shift in period lessens the inevitability of Julie's suicide, Harris creates a compelling production - a quiet, conversational and seductive dance of death.
· At the MacPhail Centre, Ullapool, on Friday (box office: 01854 613336). Then touring.
