If you watch the Donmar’s A Month in the Country, as I did, through the prism of Frederick Ashton’s sparer 1976 one-act ballet, the comic bones of Turgenev’s original mid-19th century play will still be discernible. But director Lyndsey Turner has dressed up this 1992 adaptation of the play by Brian Friel as something closer to a period screwball comedy. Which period isn’t exactly clear.
Our first glimpse of Natalya, the restless lady of the house around whom all the action whirls, comes as a face poking through the tall, dense hedge that guards the perimeter of the stage. Sophie Okonedo’s expression is both pixie-like and semi-anguished – everything with this mercurial woman is “semi”, only half-done when she veers off in a different direction. When the “hedge” rises, to reveal a set with an elegant sofa on a carpet of lawn and tall grasses at the rear, we find, not the mid-19th century Natalya of Turgenev’s play, or even a later Ballybeg matron, but a dead ringer for the kind of force of nature regularly portrayed by Katharine Hepburn, sporting a glamorous hairstyle with flick-up ends and wearing a chic long-skirted, plum-coloured number Hepburn would have been happy in.
Which is odd as the other members of the cast are in various versions of 19th century attire suited to rural lifestyles, from menial to genteel. The young Irish tutor, Aleksey (Patrick Gibson), recently arrived to instruct the unseen son of the house, has clothing that speaks of a hard-scrabble life. Only Natalya’s mother-in-law, Anna (Susan Brown, pictured bottom right), shows signs of a soignée upbringing. But although a character’s social class is immediately visible, the gap between Natalya and the rest is still marked. She is almost literally a creature from another world, an approach Friel’s version lends itself to, as he pumps up her status as a domestic goddess that men are in awe of.
The text makes references to Moscow and horse-drawn carriages and winnowing machines, but essentially we are in the land of farce here. At the back of the set, a single narrow door is used for exits and entrances, channelling the cast into one significant stream of people – as if all Feydeau’s doors have been condensed down to one. The human chaos of this situation, where would-be lovers are constantly meeting and retreating, has a forceful visual correlative.
They all feed a plot that becomes a maze. Natalya, who has a doting husband and a comfortable life but claims to love Aleksey, is quietly loved by her stalwart friend MIchel (Alistair Petrie); her ward Vera (Rachelle Diedericks), who also decides she loves Aleksey, is being pursued by the local doctor, Shpigelsky (Daniel Rigby), on behalf of an older local, Bolshintsov (Michael Hodgson), in exchange for some horses; Shpigelsky may or may not have intentions towards Lizaveta (Amanda Wilkin), Anna’s companion; Matvey (Jonathan Livingstone) is desperately wooing another servant, Katya (a wonderfully acerbic Jessica Brindle, pictured above left with Mark Hadfield); and Herr Schaaf (Mark Hadfield), Kolya’s German tutor, is after anything In a skirt. Natalya’s industrious husband Arkady (Thomas Arnold) is the only man who isn’t obviously part of this charivari, but even he stands to lose his best friend Michel over their rival claims on Natalya.
Miraculously, the whole affair stays afloat and is rewardingly funny from the off. In one of the opening scenes, a card game is in progress at which Herr Schaaf’s fractured English is the main attraction, impeccably corrected and dismissed by Brown’s sharp-tongued Anna. Schaaf is a fount of unusual malapropisms, the best possibly being his announcement that he is a “lecher” (which he is, but he means “archer”). Daniel Rigby, who began his career as a standup, revels in Shpigelsky’s knowingly cheesy jokes, and even Alastair Petrie drops Michel’s solemnity for some barbed witticisms before going back to reading Tristram Shandy.
The melancholy and self-deception that Chekhov would explore 40 years later are all here but not in a mode that leads to guns being fired: Natalya Petrovna is not Anna Karenina or Irina Arkadina. We are on Friel’s home turf, a fertile place for drama, where civility can give way to romantic impulses that are rarely sustained. Conversely, ennui is there too, but often overlaid by a cheery sense of community.
What is being toyed with here is the role of love in daily life. Are they compatible? Or does loving a woman evolve into enslavement, as Michel believes? He’s not the only cynic in the house. Anna, who admits her husband was loving and kind, reveals he was also annually unfaithful to her; disparagingly she remarks that unrequited lovers are the lucky ones. Vera, on the brink of being officially in love, has to decide whether to submit to a loveless marriage to a well-off man, as most young parentless women (still) might.
It’s fascinating to have seen a former fearsome Medea tackling Natalya Petrovna, an embryonic malcontent with potentially serious confusions. Okonedo’s snippy-snappy handling of dialogue and on-a-dime mood swings are razor-sharp, and she and the rest of the uniformly fine cast land this well oiled comedy impressively. It was only after it was over that I asked myself what I had just seen. There was a battle quietly being fought between passion and social niceties, but it’s not a drum Turner was banging that hard. And how deep-rooted were we supposed to find Natalya’s feelings for Aleksey? If he stayed, would she really be “lost”, as she melodramatically declares? Is she already lost, a woman bored with her socially dictated role? The script doesn’t oblige her, or us, to find out, frustratingly.
- A Month in the Country at Donmar Warehouse until 3 Oct
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
