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Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie reimagines Strindberg’s 1888 play, Miss Julie – arguably his best known work – and transposes its Swedish characters into an English country house on the night of the Labour Party’s landslide 1945 election victory over the Conservatives. Belfast-based Prime Cut theatre company, under the directorship of Emma Jordan, has now taken Marber’s original reworking and further transformed its setting and characters, placing them in a Fermanagh estate on V-E Day – (May 8, 1945) the day which marks the end of the Second World War, signalling victory for Europe following Germany’s surrender.

Sarah Bacon’s impressively comprehensive and naturalistic set features a working stove and running water – all elements of the kitchen wherein the majority of the drama’s action takes place. Miss Julie’s father is the unnamed Count of this Fermanagh estate and the play comprises of Julie and two servants – the cook, Christine and her father’s valet, John. John is all but engaged to marry Christine, but John and Julie are madly in love and as Julie enters and subsequently dominates the domestic space, her interactions with both John and Christine raise questions of class, duty, gender and point towards socio-political and socio-cultural endemics.

Ciaran McMenamin is excellent as John as he teases out the complexities of his character – a man with undeniable aspirations to grandeur but internally and inherently bound by duty and servitude. John’s interactions with Julie are marked by flamboyant and flirtatious, but suggestively limited interjections of French and as their dalliance is overtly played out on the kitchen table, John’s inferiority complex is inescapable. Pauline Hutton plays Christine with beautiful subtlety but Lisa Dwyer Hogg as the coquettish, but helplessly innocent titular character is undoubtedly the star of the show. As she tells her servant lover that “men like to keep their women, but not their promises”, Dwyer Hogg not only has some of the play’s most memorable lines but she elucidates some of its central themes and issues. This is a world wherein love and heartbreak are one in the same thing, possibility and impossibility are inextricably intertwined and opportunity is lost as quick as it is won.

If at times After Miss Julie can move into camp hyperbole, it is most effective in the action that is unseen and indeed unheard. What happens offstage ultimately impinges and is brought into the domestic sphere and the moments of onstage silence are filled with what could have been. Julie, John and Christine, regardless of their social status are all imprisoned in a world from which there is no escape – a world wherein freedom can only be found through unthinkable tragedy.

After Miss Julie is running in Project Arts Centre’s Space Upstairs until March 19.