The House Party - by Laura Lomas (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A wild party. A friendship. A cherished pet. And a night that changes everything.

It's Julie's eighteenth 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 revelers 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.

But as the volume goes up and the shots go down, Julie concocts a twisted cocktail of privilege, desire and destruction.

Laura Lomas's play The House Party spins Strindberg's classic play Miss Julie into intense, fizzing life for today's generation. It was first performed at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, in 2024, co-produced with Headlong in association with Frantic Assembly, and directed by Holly Race Roughan.

Review Quotes

"Dazzling... brings Strindberg's classic searing into the 21st century, a blazing hot ménage à trois that transforms the stage into a cauldron of desire, resentment and revenge." --Broadway World

"Fresh, ferociously intense and visually striking... this searing, emotionally charged adaptation puts a convincing contemporary twist on the dark story of class conflict, self-destruction and seething sexual tension." --The Stage

"Ferocious... blows the roof off the theatre... Laura Lomas has brought the classic play bang up to date... bracingly relevant and searingly shocking." --WhatsOnStage

About the Author

Laura Lomas is a playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: The House Party after August Strindberg's Miss Julie (Chichester Festival Theatre / Headlong / Frantic Assembly, 2024); Metamorphoses, co-written with Sami Ibrahim and Sabrina Mahfouz, after Ovid (Shakespeare's Globe, 2021); Chaos (National Theatre Connections); The Blue Road (Dundee Rep, Derby Theatre, Royal & Derngate and Theatre Royal Plymouth youth companies); Joanne (Clean Break & Soho Theatre); Bird (Root Theatre and Echo); Blister (Paines Pough/Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama); Open Heart Surgery (Theatre Uncut); Come to Where I'm From (Paines Plough); Some Machine (Paines Plough/Rose Bruford); The Island (Nottingham Playhouse/Det Norske Oslo); Us Like Gods (Hampstead, Heat and Light); Gypsy Girl (Paines Plough Later at Soho) and Wasteland (New Perspectives/Derby Theatre; shortlisted for the Brian Way Award).

Radio plays include My Boy (BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play; Bronze SONY Award for best radio drama) and Lucy Island (BBC Radio 3).

Her screen work includes Rough Skin (Touchpaper/Channel 4; shortlisted for Best British Short at British Independent Film Awards and Raindance Film Festival). She has also written two episodes of Glue (E4/Eleven Films), and has been commissioned by BBC Radio 4, Manchester Royal Exchange, and jointly by Clean Break and Birmingham Rep. She was a MacDowell Colony Fellow 2013, and a Yaddo Fellow 2014.

August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. His plays include The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), To Damascus (1898), The Dance of Death (1900), A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1908).