Why did the National mess with this classic?
THE Royal National Theatre’s big new show — a Patrick Marber take on Turgenev’s 1850ish A Month In The Country — has some stonking acting and a grandeur of ambition. With its hints of the still-distant revolution, it has a potential sweep as broad as the oil painting of a Russian landscape which is projected on the back of the Lyttleton’s wide stage.
Amanda Drew is magnetic as Natalya, the rich wife trapped on the remote estate of her decent-but-dull husband (John Light). John Simm is well cast as Natalya’s suitor. Throw in troupers Gawn Grainger as a tutor and Nigel Betts as a shy farmer; add Mark Gatiss on top comical form (almost too much so) as a country doctor.
And yet I came away from the first night a little unsatisfied. The story failed to create the necessary aura of rural suffocation. It did not quite ring true. Why?
Mr Marber, whose fluent adaptation is an act of admirable truncation, directs his own show. That is not always a good idea. Furthermore, the programme credits an association with Sonia Friedman, one of our more clunkingly impressionable commercial producers.
Does that explain the fashionconscious staging which dispenses with a traditional set and gives us suspended squares of lavatory glass and a symbolic red door (behind which naughty gropings occur)? Does it explain the actors sitting on chairs in view of the audience when they are not ‘on’? Oh dear, not that cliche of trendiness!
And does it explain the weird white make-up plastered on the face of Lily Sacofsky, who plays teenage beauty Vera? Two other younger actors, Royce Pierreson and Cherrelle Skeete, seem to have sprung from a different era, so much do they glottal-stop. Miss Drew asserts herself as a talented femme fatale, giving Natalya a minxy smile and an imperiousness.
We are left in no doubt that the great Russian landowners of the mid-1800s were almost absolute rulers of their vast landholdings. Yet the Russian provinces were stultifying in their culture and the company they offered.
Natalya’s frustration in the sticks is matched by the frustration other characters — and eventually she, too — feel in love. This sense of being trapped is hardly served by the high-hung glass which makes the upper half of the stage so airy.
The National’s sets department has often excelled itself with the interiors of large Russian houses. Why not do so here? With mel- lower lighting and a greater sense of physical compartmentalisation, it might have helped to establish greater melancholy for frustration. Or was the desire for something new irresistible? Yet the new should not be a concern in this tale. Turgenev is describing the constraints of the old and it would help if we were shown it.
What a pity. There is much to admire here, and I doubt anyone will actively regret taking in this tightly paced and entertaining evening. But under a more experienced director — one prepared to ignore the conventions of modernity — it could be so much more evocative.
A Version of this review appeared in earlier editions.