The House Party stars Gentleman Jack actor Tom Lewis from Leeds, at Courtyard Theatre from 25 February until 1 March.
A wild party, a friendship, a cherished pet and a night that changes everything. It’s Julie’s 18th birthday, and she’s throwing a party in her father’s extravagant townhouse. Her boyfriend has just dumped her and her long-suffering best friend Christine is trying to pick up the pieces. As the revellers pile into the booze, down in the kitchen Christine and her boyfriend Jon – son of Julie’s cleaner – clear up and dare to dream of the future. But as the volume goes up and the shots go down, Julie concocts a twisted cocktail of privilege, desire and destruction.
Leeds Playhouse has announced a terrific trio for The House Party, a bold adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. This co-production with Chichester Festival Theatre and Headlong, in association with Frantic Assembly, will kick off its UK tour in Leeds from 21 Feb – 1 Mar.Sesley Hope (Bridgerton) will play Christine, Synnøve Karlsen (Miss Austen, Last Night in Soho, Clique) will play Julie and Tom Lewis (Patience, Gentleman Jack, Breach), from Leeds, will play Jon.
Written by Laura Lomas (Metamorphoses, The Blue Woman, Chaos), The House Party is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie for today’s generation directed by Headlong’s Artistic Director Holly Race Roughan (The New Real, A View from the Bridge, Henry V). The production continues the Playhouse’s long-term partnership with Headlong (Jitney, A Raisin in the Sun), and will feature members of Frantic Assembly’s Ignition programme, a free, nationwide talent development programme for people aged 16-24, including local young people from the Leeds City Region.
August Strindberg’s play Miss Julie has been re-imagined numerous times since it was
first staged in 1888 but when director Holly Race Roughan and writer Laura Lomas
approached the story, they decided to create a radical new version for audiences today.
Where the original tells of the fall-out of a brief moment of passion across the class divide,
The House Party explores the relationships between three teenagers, Julie, her friend
Christine and Christine’s boyfriend Jon, and how one night can change their lives for ever.
As Artistic Director of Headlong Theatre, (who have produced The House Party along with
Frantic Assembly and Chichester Festival Theatre) Holly says it was essential that the story speak to modern audiences and make us hear this classic afresh.
Holly: I think Miss Julie is one of the best plays ever written about the intersection between the
personal and the political, but I re-read it and realised we needed a new version
with more about the psychology and humanity of the characters. Laura was the right person
to contemporize it but also complicate it.
As a production company, we are interested in making a version where you feel first for the
characters before you then think about them. What is genius about Lomas’ and the
Strindberg version is it’s so balanced, you can’t really come down on one side. Who is the
victim and the perpetrator? Each page slides you back round the drama triangle.
The team also decided to give the play its new name The House Party to signify its
differences from Miss Julie.
I’m really interested at Headlong in estranging audiences from works they think they know
really well in order to allow them a contemporary experience of hearing those stories for the
first time.
Having a different name is partly to acknowledge that this is quite a radical new
interpretation. It’s so exciting when you don’t know what’s going to happen next when you’re sitting in the theatre. If it’s called The House Party and is based on Miss Julie you know the
playground it’s in, but you don’t really know what’s going to happen next. That allows us to
create experience that feels more like a modern day thriller.
When the show premiered at Chichester in May 2024, one of the great joys for the creative
team was seeing how it appeals to all ages, but especially young people.
We were quite knocked out by the reaction by different generations. It’s in the
mouths of 18-year-olds but it’s an inter-generational theatrical experience.
Headlong’s place in the theatre ecology is in part, I believe, to be a gateway drug so what
really excites me, amongst also playing to brilliant and loyal core audiences, is playing to first
timers. What Laura has written is such a tense, exciting show that if it’s your first time going
to the theatre you’re going to want to come back.
In writing The House Party, Laura was keen to retain the original play at the heart but adapt it
to give it relevance and resonance.
Laura: Strindberg is so immediate, dramatically it grabs you by the throat and never stops.
The challenge in trying to make it contemporary is being able to update it and also hold onto
that propulsive drama and make it authentic when the context of today is very different.
It’s very emotional and there’s something quite teenage and hormonal about that. And so
the idea of setting it in a teenage house party arose. Along with that came the idea of making
this party really vibrant and anarchic.
I think it’s a play about friendship and class and it’s about three teenagers who don’t fully
understand the external pressures that are bearing down on them and the destructive force
of that. So in some ways it’s an awakening or a coming of age for them. But I have also
written humour into it so it’s funny and entertaining.
The friends face the power of external pressures such as social media.
Laura: It’s about Julie’s experience of being sexually shamed online so it’s also about misogyny.
There is a sense that Julie is a bit of a femme fatale in the original and I really wanted to address that in this updating. I wanted us to find a way of understanding Julie as
someone who is also marginalised and objectified and acting out of the social violence she
has experienced by being told that her only worth is her sexual currency.
There are so many big intersections in all of the characters so race, gender, class, but there
are also smaller intersections which hopefully mean that different people will hook into
different things with each of these characters. There’s so much going on in the knot between them that your sympathies will shift, but hopefully within that journey you will understand them all.
The success of The House Party would not have been possible without the collaboration of
the three producing partners.
Holly: The production really is a love child of the dynamic movement of Frantic Assembly, Headlong’s commitment to vivid robust thrilling new writing and Chichester’s ‘yes we can’ attitude to producing. All three of us felt deeply proud of the show last year and
felt we had surpassed what we could do without each other.
Leeds Playhouse presents a Chichester Festival Theatre and Headlong co-production in association with Frantic Assembly
The House Party
21 Feb – 1 Mar 2025
Courtyard Theatre
Age 14+
Image: Sesley Hope, Tom Lewis and Synnøve Karlsen
