Never afraid of trying something new, the Young Vic’s revival of After Miss Julie, which opens in March next year, will be the venue’s first show to experiment with its use of electricity.
The first in a series of productions entitled Classics For A New Climate, the team reviving Patrick Marber’s drama – led by director Natalie Abrahami and designer Patrick Burnier – will investigate ways of creating theatre while taking as little electricity from the National Grid as possible.
Marber’s tragedy is full of its own electricity, telling a tale set in an England at the point of change. July 1945, the Labour Party wins a landslide election and Miss Julie’s world is turned upside down.
After Miss Julie is staged in the Young Vic’s Maria theatre, following a revival of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s Elizabethan tragedy The Changeling. The tale of love, sex and madness centres on Beatrice-Joanna, a woman so in love that she hires the repellent De Flores to kill the man her father would have her marry. When the deed is done, however, she discovers the true price of De Flores’s actions.
The Changeling, which runs from 26 January to 18 February, is directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, the Deputy Artistic Director of the Young Vic whose credits include The Beauty Queen Of Leenane and The Glass Menagerie at the Waterloo venue and The Village Bike at the Royal Court.
The Changeling and After Miss Julie are the latest productions to be added to a Young Vic line-up including Michael Sheen in Hamlet and Patrick Stewart in Bingo.
MA