MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review The Tasters, A Pale View of Hills, How To Make a Killing, and Reminders of Him
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Miss Julie, Jermyn Street Theatre London
August Strindberg's febrile drama of class and sex conflicts gets an outstanding production
Power play: Charlotte Hamblin and James Sheldon in Miss Julie
SYLVIA HIKINS celebrates the chance that a new memoir offers to explore Frieda Brewster’s remarkable life story
JOHN GREEN is intrigued by an explanation of irrational behaviour from the point of view of brain science
PAUL DONOVAN enjoys a somewhat rose-tinted survey of Brown’s achievements and legacy, as well as his moments of political cowardice
GUILLERMO THOMAS recommends an important, if dispiriting book about the neo-colonial culture of Uganda under Yoweri Museveni
SUSAN DARLINGTON applauds the sensuality and strong characterisation of an unconventional ballet about an unconventional woman
SET on Midsummer’s Eve in Sweden— a time for partying, rule-breaking and indulging in the forbidden — August Strindberg described his 1888 play Miss Julie as “a naturalistic tragedy.”
Immersed in a world where the lower orders and the ruling classes co-exist in a seemingly perpetual dependency, his most popular work homes in on a fateful night in an aristocratic home, where madness is in the air and the servants revel in abandon.
During it, the upper-class Miss Julie — in a story that almost tells itself — rocks the social code to its foundations when she seduces the handsome valet Jean.
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Although this production was in rehearsal before the playwright’s death, it allows us to pay homage to his life, suggests MARY CONWAY
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a play that presents Shelley as polite and conventional man who lives a chocolate box, cottagey life
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic