"A twisted cocktail of privilege, desire and destruction" on the Chichester stage

“It feels like it has been a really long lead time but it means that we've had the luxury of having done a couple of workshops,” Laura says. “And it is really nice to return to it. I still feel a really strong connection with the text. It doesn’t feel like a really, really earlier version of myself!”

But perhaps the wait heightens the excitement of finally getting it to the stage: “The first night is terrifying but it's also a really joyful thing. I hand it over and that's part of the magic of theatre, this amazing collaboration. For so long as a writer it is just you and the text but then you get that magical moment of sharing it.”

A co-production with Headlong in association with Frantic Assembly, The House Party runs in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre from Friday, May 3-Saturday, June 1, the tale of a wild party, a friendship, a cherished pet and a night that changes everything – a twisted cocktail of privilege, desire and destruction.

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.

For Laura, the original is a classic play about class. The idea to revisit it came out of a conversation with Holly Race Roughan who is directing it: “We were looking at how we might do a contemporary version of Miss Julie exploring class politics when class is not quite as rigid as when Strindberg was writing it. The transgression of sleeping with somebody from a different class back then doesn't feel quite so big now so we both went away and read the original again. One of the things that really struck me about it was just how sharp the corners were, how extreme the emotional oscillation is. One moment it is ‘I love you and I want to run away with you’ and the next it is ‘I hate you.’ It is very extreme. It is extremely volatile and it turns on a hairpin. I just thought that those extremes of emotion were quite hormonal and that's why we thought what about if you set it at a teenage house party. And I was also thinking what if you were talking about a comprehensive school with all kinds of people from all kinds of different class backgrounds there and everyone is together but then there are moments that reveal how different the people are.”

The original was a brutal play, full of electricity, a dangerous piece of theatre, Laura says – and that's what she wanted to pick up on: “I wanted the electricity of the power relationships.”

The House Party runs in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre from Friday, May 3-Saturday, June 1