August Strindberg crosses paths with Público Reservado, a company that specialises in idiosyncratic repertoire productions, with recent visits to universes of Novarina, Handke, Lagarce or Pirandello. Now, in reply to a challenge from the TNSJ, Público Reservado takes on Menina Júlia [Miss Julie] (1888), a play written in just two weeks. An urgency perhaps explained by the fact that the verb “to love” is conjugated here as “a fever intersected by the syncope of hate”, to use the words of the Swedish playwright. Menina Júlia tells us of the houses and walls we still use to confine women, of bodies set loose in the wars of love, of a class struggle that is inextricable from the battle of the sexes. It is like an intimate sonata being performed in a social arena. Renata Portas looks at this turmoil and makes some wishes for it: “I would like this stage production to resemble an initiation dance between Schnitzler’s La Ronde and Larry Clarke’s Kids; I would like it to be an ode to sensuality and beauty, and to that free fall experienced by Artaud, Rimbaud, Van Gogh and all the others who dared to explore the abyss in themselves.”