Something to offend everyone

You won't find him listed in the respected Halliwell's Film Guide but he is featured in Doing Rude Things, a guide to British sex films - giving an idea of the end of the market in which he was most active.

His work, as either a writer or director and sometimes both, takes in soft core romps like Adventures Of A Taxi Driver, Sex Thief and Eskimo Nell as well as horror movies such as Haunted House Of Horror and House Of Long Shadows, teaming horror gurus Cushing, Price and Lee.

His last film to date, Mark Of The Devil, made in Germany in 1970, remains banned in this country. For the US release, cinemagoers were issued with sick bags on the way in for a film described as "90 minutes of solid violence".

Armstrong, who teaches drama and has a pile of unfilmed scripts waiting for backers, says: "The film has been seen everywhere else but not England. It's ridiculous. It came out briefly on video but about 20 minutes had been cut. It's a harrowing film but, by modern standards, is very crudely made and the special effects are nothing like they are now."

His film background is evident in his latest project, a stage production of August Strindberg's Miss Julie which contains, to quote the advance information, "nudity, violence and explicit sex scenes and is unsuitable for persons under the age of 16 and people of nervous disposition". Something to offend everyone, you might say. Or as the poster proclaims You've Never Seen it Like This Before! The word never is in capital letters and underlined to ensure the point is made.

Clearly, Armstrong is bringing some of that unrestrained movie hype to the world of theatre in his telling of the story of an aristocratic woman and her servant who give in to their passion. Wait, is that whizzing noise you can hear Strindberg turning in his grave? Possibly, but Armstrong doesn't see why. "I've done him a service," he suggests. The words are "totally Strindberg'", he maintains. "It's the staging which is different. The only alteration in the text is that in the play there's no interval and a big sex scene off-stage while singing peasants come on and carouse. All I've done is get rid of the peasants and have sex on the stage. And then have an interval."

Presumably this is to give the audience time to recover although, expectations are now so high, that Armstrong was busy "hotting up the love story" when I spoke to him.

If you think that this classical play is an unlikely choice for him to stage, he'd agree with you. Miss Julie is a play he'd never thought of directing "because usually it's very boring, very much a museum piece" but an actor friend wanted to play the lead and Armstrong agreed to direct "under duress".

He thought back to 1888, when the play was premiered to gasps of shock and horror from audiences. "In its day it was controversial," he explains. "It shocked both creatively as one of the first naturalistic plays and with the subject matter as one of the first to be blatant about psychological sex games between men and women. I thought, 'how can you get the same effect on the audience today?' I pulled the inside of the play out to make it like a modern play. The effect on the audience has been incredible.

"Because I come from a background of making horror films and sex comedies, I'm very conscious of getting a cinema audience in. Theatre is much more exciting than seeing a film, just as going to a concert is more exciting than listening to CDs. There are two or three generations who've never known that feeling in the theatre.

"I'm very much in favour of theatre and entertainment being the same thing. Forget art. Our production faced gasps of amazement and shock. The audience burst into spontaneous applause once. The act one sex scene goes very far indeed and some of the games in the second half are so vicious. It does shock but in the right way."

He says that the media tend to pick up the sex shocker angle - something to do with the pictures and prose put out to publicise the production, perhaps? - but Armstrong feels the ideas are what startle and shock. What he didn't want was just to have two people stripping off on stage ("that's giggle-land"). It's different in movies where body make-up and lighting can be used to create a fantasy "we would all like our sex lives to be".

"We have increased the erotica and perversion ideas," he explains. "Although you don't see much, it has an incredible impact. People say, 'we didn't think you would go that far'."

Presumably theatre staff will be on hand with buckets of cold water to throw over excited patrons after seeing actors Freddy Douglas and Cressida Carre indulging in naked rumpy-pumpy.

There is even a spot of audience participation. Not, alas, in the sex scene but with the actors moving among them and talking to them but not, he emphasises, in a confrontational way. "They treat the audience as if they are people who can help with their lives," he says.

Just like Arnie's Terminator, Armstrong will be back in York. He's abandoned his film-making temporarily to put together a 20-strong commercial rep company which will tour the country in three productions later this year - Into The Woods, The Critic and Romeo And Juliet ("the Michael Armstrong version, no children allowed").

* Miss Julie is at York Grand Opera House on Tuesday and Wednesday at 7.30pm. Tickets £10, £7.50 concessions. Box office (01904) 671818.