The tiny Jermyn Street Theatre hard by Piccadilly Circus is, under its new artistic director Tom Littler, to become a full-time producing house. Littler’s first production  as supremo is a canny curtain-raiser for his November production of a new version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie by Howard Brenton. In The Blinding Light, Brenton writes about Strindberg’s “Inferno” period in the mid-1890s, when he holed up in a Parisian hotel room and apparently became obsessed with the Great Work of alchemy, transmuting base material into gold.

The truth about this period is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; likewise what we are expected to take as the dramatic reality. According to Strindberg’s own account, he was not just serious about the alchemy but pathologically fixated upon it; likewise, here, Jasper Britton’s clothes and hands are stained with various pigments, as the gloomy Swede uses his offstage bathtub for the first “putrefying” stage of the magnum opus. He imagines himself assailed by an assortment of demons and succubi; some live in the walls and are voiced in a mocking falsetto by Britton himself (I couldn’t help thinking about the online animations at www.strindbergandhelium.com), some may or may not take the form of a hotel maid, his divorced first and estranged second wives, all by turns cajoling or threatening him to give up this obsession and return to sanity and the world of the theatre which he has forsaken.

Britton never stints in his performance: he bellows, rumbles, glares, shambles, a lank ruin of a man with nothing but his will, or his psychosis, to pit against Laura Morgan’s blunt maid, Susannah Harker’s disdainful first wife and Gala Gordon’s sultry second. Then right at the end, as he recites “the seven operations of the Great Work”, we begin to twig a lesser known aspect of alchemy: that it also serves as a metaphor for remaking and transforming the alchemist himself. After this phase, Strindberg’s naturalistic dramas would give way to vast, almost unstageable spiritual meditations, as if he really had become a different substance of writer. Littler pitches the proceedings perfectly for the space (about half the capacity even of Strindberg’s own later Intimate Theatre); Cherry Truluck’s set covers the hotel walls with blown-up details from the playwright’s expressionistic paintings.

Written for the Financial Times.