SOURCE: Spencer, Charles. “The Arts: Turn up the Heat.” The Daily Telegraph (March 2, 2000): 26.

Below, Spencer offers a review of the production of Miss Julie at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, London, directed by Michael Boyd.

It is de rigueur these days to mock those bewhiskered Victorians who took such exception to the scandalous Scandinavian plays of Ibsen and Strindberg. But though Ibsen now seems more like an earnest moralist than a shock merchant, Strindberg still comes over as a thoroughly disconcerting writer.

Few of us would now describe Miss Julie (1888) as “a heap of ordure”, still less ban it from the stage, as happened in England as late as 1925 on the grounds that this “sordid” and “disgusting” work undermined the relationship between masters and servants.

Nevertheless, there is an edge of hysteria about Strindberg, an imaginative nastiness not far removed from mental unbalance, which ensures that his best...