Julie begins with a trapdoor drop into a weird half-world. The intoxicated daughter of privilege slinks into the darkened kitchen of the family mansion to take a drink, while the electronic music from her down-the-hall birthday party thumps away. Then, in a wrenching shift to symbolism, she moves into an extended and arrestingly choreographed, angular dance. In this way, Icarus Theatre’s production declares its doubled nature immediately. Kinetic and naturalistic, and yet persistently representational and symbolic, Julie is at least two things at once — and in its slipperiness, strong performances and abundant provocations, the show is compulsively watchable and thought-provoking.
August Strindberg’s original Miss Julie (1888) is a pressure-cooker of class, misogyny, and desire. In it, a count’s daughter and her male servant combust within a single midsummer night, and face ultimately fatal fallout. Their taboo encounter is hemmed in by class hierarchy and anxiety about proper gender behavior, and the play’s early audiences were scandalized by its unvarnished candour. Polly Stenham’s 2018 update, set among London’s moneyed elite, shifts the locus of sin from the simple crossing of class toward the deeper corrosions of wealth and race. It reframes the protagonists’ transgressions as the jittery work of self-making within systems and histories that refuse to release them.
Icarus’ production at Tarragon Theatre’s Extraspace is skilfully directed and designed by Jordan Laffrenier, with an eye on its two truths. Yes, we’re in the kitchen of the posh home of Julie’s wealthy father: it is centered by a table and chairs, with a simple bar at the back left, stocked with bottles, glasses and a jug. But behind it all lies not a kitchen’s drab back wall, but a primal, red-brown gradient shot through with jagged sound waves or lightning strikes. This symbolic shell reminds us that Julie, her father’s driver Jean, and the housekeeper Kristina are not just individuals: they are also representations of large, volatile and inescapable concerns such as race, gender, class (or underclass), and role.
The show’s costuming compounds the argument: the trio’s notably bare feet strip away status markers, and root them in this shared, primal backdrop. For the uninhibited and inebriated Julie, who floats around in a negligee, it’s a realistic detail. For Jean the chauffeur (in uniform), and Kristina the housekeeper / mother / student, it’s unrealistic: a leveling tactic that grounds the banality of the bodies beneath the distinctness of their roles. Meanwhile, Jamal Jones’s soundscape and Erik Richards’s design yoke the thumping party to the room’s tremors, while Chris Malkowski’s lighting punctuates the night with crisp jolts that give way to the creeping illumination of dawn.
As Julie, Emily Anne Corcoran is a marvelously mercurial mess. By turns brittle, vulnerable, sexual and violent, she clambers repeatedly onto the kitchen table, commandeering its functional space as bully pulpit, pew, stage and boudoir. And despite the privilege that allows her to do this, plus her seizure of an agency which is not there in Strindberg, she still feels at times like the meal about to be consumed on it. Jamar Adams-Thompson’s Jean, who is the object of her entitled appetites, oscillates between disgust, social-climbing ambition, cruelty, and a strangely excessive mix of fear and horror. It’s a strong performance inside an underwritten or shrewdly opaque role: Stenham’s Jean is less a prime mover of the plot than a race-and-class cog in the grinding socioeconomic machine running in the background.
The pace of the show feels feverishly quick — like watching a TV show fast-forwarded through the lead-up, the passion and its multi-layered aftermath. Then it screeches to a halt.
At this point, Tara Sky’s grounded housekeeper Kristina steps unexpectedly to the fore. Her quiet caregiving and studious aspiration have been continual and unobtrusive counterweights to the bluster and bravado of Julie and Jean. Now she concentrates them into a devastating indictment that detonates their self-absorbed, transparent cosplay and lays bare the true offence, its price, and the real victim.
It’s a bracing reorientation – especially given an ending that delivers Strindberg’s finality more graphically and with a different moral inflection. Ultimately, Julie is fast, absorbing and unsparing: it refracts Strindberg through contemporary inequities to argue that the real tragedy is never a single transgressive act, but the compounding systems that shape it. We’re allowed to thrill at human volatility in the foreground, but the production insists that we reckon with the structures in the background — which will outlast this night at the theatre, and shape the days after.
Julie continues at Tarragon Theatre until March 28, 2026. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
