Julie, do you want me?

A brilliant reworking of Miss Julie revives the play. And Electra's still electric

After Miss Julie

Donmar, London WC2

Mourning Becomes Electra

Lyttelton, London SE1

The Secret Rapture

Lyric, London W1

Part voyeuristic body-ripper, part angry class-warfare. At one instant slow and domestic; at the next, full of hysterical flights. It's not easy to make Miss Julie work on the stage. But the Donmar has found a way. Patrick Marber has done Strindberg and the stage a big favour by supplying a fundamental reimagining of Strindberg's play. And Michael Grandage has given it a fiercely attentive, magnetic production.

The basic plot remains. One heady night, an upper-class young woman has a fling with a manservant that destroys her. But Marber has moved the play from nineteenth-century Sweden to England in 1945, and the night of the Labour Party's election victory. In doing so, he has clarified the action (things go a bit foggy, especially in the sex area, in the original), and tightly focused the social relations.

The man's fiancée who circles the action, watching on with sour pragmatism, looks here like a new kind of female and a new kind of working class - well capable of running things if she's really going to get power. Even in a pinny, Helen Baxendale looks more like a Vogue cover than a drudge, but she powerfully projects the shrewdness, the composure and realism that will cause her pain but give her strength.

Marber has cut some dull bits of back-plot, and added some wit of his own: the play loses none of its darkness for being made more springy and astringent.

There will always be some things that don't exactly add up: why exactly do the one-night-standers feel so shamed? Is a bloody end really inevitable? But new kinds of sense emerge in this version, where all three characters are caught in an old system with the possibility of change dangled elusively before them. And it's the brilliance of Grandage's production to transmit emotions so hugely in excess of the facts and of reason that the action of the play seems to have a lunar logic of its own, and the changes of temperature to follow a hidden pulse: moving in a second from the deliberate to the wild and hectic.

Bunny Christie's meticulous period kitchen - with its painted brick walls, its small jug of flowers, its table with brass-handled drawers - is solid, well-ordered. It's the fitting arena for those long passages where Baxendale is peacefully alone on stage, smoking, boiling up potions (to make a dog miscarry), arranging her master's boots. And the perfect, unexpected setting for a brutal sexual encounter.

Richard Coyle's manservant is terrific: stealthy and fervent - both attractive and dislikeable. Kelly Reilly gives an amazing portrait of a wounded creature bent on hurting herself still more. Her voice is as clipped as the Queen's was at the same period; she moves as if her limbs were unwelcome, fragile attachments. She suggests someone allergic to herself; someone with neurasthenia wired into her. It suddenly seems pertinent that this landed lady's father committed suicide.

Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra - written between 1928 and 1931, but set in New England at the end of the American Civil War - is entirely concerned with such bloody inheritances. Everything about this trilogy declares its epic ambition. The broad canvas against which the story of the doomed family is set; the high death toll (two murders and two suicides); the basis of the plays in Greek tragedy - Aeschylus's Oresteia - the length of the plays, which uncut run to about six hours, though the National have got it down to four-and-a-half.

None of this means it's a profound examination of American family life; none of this makes it less enjoyable. It's arresting; big on plot and scanty on expression. It's stuffed with old-style seductive belles, incestuous alliances, steamy plots and no-holds-barred truth-telling and - oh lawdie - black folk crooning Shenandoah.

O'Neill maintained the contours of the Oresteia - a father, murdered by his adulterous wife, is avenged by his children - but gave Electra a grimmer ending than Aeschylus did: locked up alone, tormented by her memories. But in modernising, he miniaturised: though every now and then someone declares that a particularly unnecessary and improbable event had to be, considerations of retribution evaporate in the characters' bed-bouncing. Every time someone dips into their dreams they come up waving a cliché: anyone for half-naked natives under coconut palms on tropical islands?

Howard Davies triumphed five years ago with his Kevin Spacey-led production of the superior The Iceman Cometh . Here his direction sweeps the action grandly along, with big gusts of music and plenty of alarums, but he's not helped by Bob Crowley's elaborate, eye-tangling design, which is continually announcing an atmosphere and never quite evoking one.

It's the central performances that lift the occasion. Rebecca Johnson is pin-sharp. Paul Hilton unravels memorably. And the bringing together of Helen Mirren and Eve Best as mother and daughter is truly fruitful. By the slant of her figure and the rounding of her arms, Mirren suggests she's spent a lifetime in a crinoline, weighed down with bouquets, full of slyness and allure. As her beauty fades - and Mirren makes you think it's actually leaving her - Best's grows. She turns from the nineteenth-century equivalent of a stony-featured traffic warden into a gorgeous geisha - and as she does so her face glows like a lantern.

In 1988 David Hare's The Secret Rapture was hailed for capturing the anti-Thatcherite moment. But Hare's illuminating documentary drama The Permanent Way has helped to make it look meagre and out-of-date. There are glimmers from humorous Peter Egan (baffled buffer); Jenny Seagrove (maddening liberal saint) is appealing, and Belinda Lang (Tory, not in touch with her feelings) squawks amusingly. But for most of Guy Retallack's production they are simply plonked in front of Robert Jones's dispiriting design uttering the obvious truth about themselves. No secret; no rapture.

Three to see

Chorus Line
Crucible, Sheffield

The longest-ever running Broadway show until Cats.

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

With the majestic Tanya Moodie.

Young Vic, London SE1

Trevor Nunn directs David Almond's magical children's story.

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