WHEN Patrick Marber reimagined August Strindberg’s Miss Julie for the BBC, he set out to be, in his own words, deliberately “unfaithful to the original.”

That much is clear from his transposition of the Swedish naturalist’s 1888 play to an English country house on the eve of Labour’s landslide victory in 1945 in After Miss Julie.

And yet far from jarring or bastardising the plot for a “modern audience”, this anachronism is ingenious. In fact the play’s fatalism resonates even more deeply 60 years later – when despite the passage of time and touted progress the heroine remains a victim of her environment and society, doomed to the same fate and untenable position as her forbear.

Pushing the story forward, to an era on the brink of social reform, the play opens at the close of a summer ball. A brazen Miss Julie, the beautiful daughter of the peer who owns the house, wanders into the servant’s quarters. She shamelessly flirts with her father’s handsome chauffeur John, indifferent to the presence of his fiancée, exhorting him to dance with her, jostling for dominance.

What begins as a twisted power struggle soon ignites into passion.

Call the Midwife star Helen George’s performance as Miss Julie is truly hypnotic. Neurotic, self-destructive and domineering, she imposes her will on the few she holds sway over, the lower classes.

Yet slivers of fragility pierce through, cracking the patina of authority and fierce independence as John (boldly played with Richard Flood) proves a worthy adversary in their intense clashes. Just like the original Miss Julie, she is a woman craving emancipation, unable to reconcile her free boyish upbringing and the stunted life she is condemned to lead as a woman of her time.

While George carries the performance on her shoulders beautifully, the production’s sluggish pace and extended periods of silence or characters’ prolonged absences (the ‘dawn scene’ when they all disappear offstage truly drags on) prove tedious. There was more fidgeting, coughing and shuffling than during any other show I can remember at the Theatre Royal. Thankfully these lulls are not enough to detract from the drama unfolding in front of us or Miss Julie’s ruinous spiral.

After Miss Julie is on at the Theatre Royal Bath until tomorrow night.