[Below, Spencer offers a review of the production of Miss Julie at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket, London, directed by Michael Boyd.]

It is de rigueur these days to mock those bewhiskered Victorians who took such exception to the scandalous Scandinavian plays of Ibsen and Strindberg. But though Ibsen now seems more like an earnest moralist than a shock merchant, Strindberg still comes over as a thoroughly disconcerting writer.

Few of us would now describe Miss Julie (1888) as “a heap of ordure”, still less ban it from the stage, as happened in England as late as 1925 on the grounds that this “sordid” and “disgusting” work undermined the relationship between masters and servants.

Nevertheless, there is an edge of hysteria about Strindberg, an imaginative nastiness not far removed from mental unbalance, which ensures that his best plays retain an unwholesome fascination. In Miss Julie, for instance, there's an extraordinary passage in which the valet, Jean, recalls spying on his young aristocratic mistress from the stinking cesspit beneath an outside lavatory, a conjunction of sex and filth that tells us much about Strindberg's attitude to women. And when Miss Julie turns on Jean, by whom she has been ruined, and declares that she could “drink out of your skull … I could roast your heart and eat it”, you realise that she would make an outstanding contributor to the Hannibal Lecter Celebrity Cookbook.

It's a brave play to stage in the West End, and Michael Boyd's production, in a new translation by Frank McGuinness, has a great deal going for it. In my view, however, it fails to penetrate to the play's dark heart. The problem is sex, or rather the lack of it.

The action is set on midsummer's night and the haughty Miss Julie, her engagement recently broken and her hormones running amok, has chosen to spend it dancing with her father's servants in the barn. There she has become fascinated by Jean, whom she pursues to the subterranean kitchen, which in Tom Piper's impressive, not-quite-naturalistic design is the size of a small factory, with a tall, red, spiral staircase climbing up to the master's quarters.

The willowy Aisling O'Sullivan, a vision in white, with rosebud lips and strawberry-blonde hair, superbly captures Miss Julie's patrician tones and quivering hysteria. Christopher Eccleston, he of the remarkably long nose, also effectively suggests Jean's uneasy mix of edgy impudence and fawning subservience. Yet apart from the moment when Miss Julie extends an elegant foot and commands the valet to kiss it, there is little sense of burning desire between the two characters.

It is always a matter of luck and chemistry whether two actors will ignite on stage, and here the vital spark is missing. Eccleston has acquired an excitable female following thanks to his intense performances on screen, but here he gives his admirers little to drool over, apart from one spectacular vault over the kitchen table.

Boyd might usefully have learnt from Polly Teale's fine production at the Young Vic a couple of years ago, which featured a brilliantly stylised, intensely erotic sex scene on the kitchen table. Instead he follows the convention of keeping sex safely off stage.

But if passionate desire goes AWOL, anger certainly doesn't. The rows and recriminations between Jean and Miss Julie, both burning with class hatred as they ponder their shattered lives, have a blazing intensity, with O'Sullivan in particular magnificently racked between snobbish hauteur and raw vulnerability.

The scene in which the other revelling servants take over the stage has exactly the right sinister, dreamlike quality, and there is touching support from Maxine Peake as Jean's down-to-earth fiancee.

This is an intelligent, notably well-acted production of a fascinatingly unpleasant play. Turn up the heat a couple of notches and it could prove sensational.