Like so much inspirational endeavour, it began in a garden shed. Enya (Eithne Ní Bhraonáin in her native Irish), dissatisfied with her role in Clannad, was experimenting with Nicky Ryan, the band’s manager, and Ryan’s wife Roma, a poet.

“No courtier or lady’s champion would dream of fighting a duel anywhere else…” The setting for duels, liaisons, champagne and love, Paris’s Pré aux Clercs gives its name to Ferdinand Herold’s almost-comic 1832 opera – a welcome mood-lightener in this season’s otherwise tragic fare at the Wexford Festival. But though the piece does end in marriages rather than deaths (at least, for those who matter), it’s not quite the uncomplicated piece of silliness we might expect, or hope, from such a staple of the Opéra Comique.

The television series Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs, along with Robert Atman’s film Gosford Park, notably illustrate the public’s continued fascination with the relation between masters, mistresses and their servants. Yet none of them, not even the Altman, charted that relation with quite as much complexity and ferocity as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, in which no-one emerges well from the class struggle.

Written in 1888, the play represented Strindberg’s attempt to bring a new degree of naturalism to theatre. Its style and psychological acuity lend itself well to cinema; though being a chamber piece with just three characters and a single setting are theatrical constraints which any film adaptation must confront. Sadly Liv Ullmann’s new film singularly fails to do so.

Plays don’t have to be “opened out”, but it helps. Cinema’s greatest Miss Julie is Swedish director (and in some ways Bergman mentor) Alf Sjöberg’s 1951 version, which is visually arresting and offers a full-blooded view of the society in which Miss Julie and her father’s valet Jean conduct their class and gender battle of wits.

Rarely has the indoctrination of social position been so disturbingly depicted Mike Figgis’s 1999 version kept the focus on the protagonists, offering little more than a mobile camera to make it cinematic, and paid the price. Ullmann does even less, using mostly static medium shots, her filming of the drama as stiff and airless as it’s possible to be. And that’s a shame, because the actors really do go for it.

The action has been transposed to the Ireland of 1890, with Miss Julie now the daughter of an English baron (if I’ve gauged Chastain’s not wholly convincing accent correctly), which adds another layer of discord between mistress and servant.

She is the lonely child of the house, her mother dead, her father away, left alone with the staff as it makes merry on Midsummer Night. She’s lofty, vain and disdainful of her servants, at one point insisting that John (Farrell) kiss her boots, and rudely dismissive of his engagement to the cook, Kathleen (Samantha Morton), as she insists on dancing with the valet. For his part, John is a preening ladies’ man and social climber, and like Julie proud, manipulative and fundamentally weak. They’re birds of a feather, you might say; but in their dangerous game, it’s Julie who's the most vulnerable.

The story is constructed as a seesaw of power between the two, which could also be regarded as a struggle of two halves – before and after they have sex, both of them thrown out of kilter by this ultimate breach of their social contract. Aside from Julie’s personal tragedy, it’s the degree to which the characters are governed by class, status and money that is the meat and drink of the piece. Rarely has the indoctrination of social position been so disturbingly depicted, as when John admits that the very presence of the Baron on the other end of the bell gives him no choice but to defer, and serve.

Standing between Julie’s self-destructive desire to “fall” and John’s vainglorious dreams of a life spending her money, it’s Kathleen (played with a compelling stoutness of character by Morton, pictured right) who is the most comfortable with her standing, chiding the others for stepping outside their boundaries. In a brilliant put down, she informs John that she’d only be jealous of him if he’d dallied with one of the other servants.

The class aspects are well presented, then. But there are two problems with the film. One is the direction, whose faults include too few external shots, no other characters and no attempt to present the world in which the action takes place. Farrell is made to constantly pace up and down vast interiors in a way that is repetitive and wearing, while the constant light outside the windows – even given that this is the longest day of the year – counteracts the idea that we are watching seething passions play out over the course of a sultry night; and that simply underlines the theatrical origins of the piece.

The other issue is that Chastain’s performance feels too skittish, if not a little mad straight out of the blocks, playing into the hands of Strindberg’s chauvinistic portrait of Julie, rather than challenging it; certainly, the character doesn't travel quite the distance that she might.

Nonetheless, with her red hair, pale skin and a nervous alertness in her eyes, the actress is extremely watchable; her doomed coquette makes me want to see her play Blanche DuBois. Farrell, on a good run of form that includes his conflicted cop in True Detective and in the up-coming, gloriously odd sci-fi The Lobster, has his machinating John turn on a dime – with those famous eyebrows working overtime – in a way that’s quite chilling. It speaks volumes that the film is simply too staid to contain the energy of their performances.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Miss Julie

For sheer, visceral performances we’ll be lucky if we get anything as strong this year as the central roles from Jack Reynor and Toni Collette in Gerald Barrett’s Glassland. Their mother-son relationship has such an almost unbearable intimacy to it that comparisons to the last chapter of the Terence Davies Trilogy aren’t out of order.

“A place of ravishing beauty that would completely stop you in your tracks.” So said Christine Bleakley as she introduced the first episode of this six-part series, during which she travels along the Wild Atlantic Way on Ireland's west coast, from County Donegal in the north to County Cork in the south, 15,000 miles of rugged coastline formed over millions of years by the ravages of the Atlantic Ocean.

When a documentary about Irish rock music starts with footage of late-period Bono shuffling about awkwardly dressed in black, my first impulse is to check my iTunes in case he’s surreptitiously shat another album into my computer. The second is to reach for the remote. Thankfully though, this was just a glimpse of what was to come down Ireland's rocky road. I had more than enough time to steel myself as we sped back in time to a point when the fledgling blues scene was first making an impact in the country.

How do we respond to a tragedy of infinite mystery? We investigate, we speculate, and we seek to impose meaning, to produce a story that safely contains unfathomable horror. However, those hoping for such reassurance via a traditional theatrical narrative in Bush Moukarzel and Dead Centre’s Lippy will come away disappointed. This darkly absurdist piece floats searching, fundamental questions, but answers came there none.

Taking its title from the opening line of WB Yeats's The Second Coming, this new album from legendary traditional Irish band Altan sees them decamp to Nashville for an imaginative, celebratory exploration of the links between traditional Irish and American roots music. It also allows them to collaborate with many of the musical friends they've made along their 30-plus years journey.

Watching this edition of Imagine… on Colm Tóibín, it was impossible not to be reminded of Graham Greene’s dictum about childhood being the bank balance of the writer. The key event in Tóibín’s childhood came at the age of eight, when his father’s serious illness saw Colm and his brother sent away to live with an aunt, and a sense of acute abandonment set in that saw him develop a stutter. His most recent novel, Nora Webster, was about just that kind of bewildering silence of a mother after the death of a father.

It's always an education to see a comic – now a part of the British comedy establishment – performing a gig in his own backyard. And Dara Ó Bríain, at the Royal Theatre in Castlebar, Co Mayo, was just that; he had, as ever, done his homework, immediately throwing in several local references, plus a few more that his Twitter followers would recognise, and told them that returning to his home country on the Irish leg of his Crowd Tickler tour after a few years away from the stage was an education for him too.