Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy adapted by Philip Breen who also directs.
Chichester Festival Theatre
Star rating: 3
Photography by Marc Brenner
Henry James once described War and Peace as a “loose, baggy monster”. Well, Anna Karenina, published ten years later in 1877, is rather less loose and baggy but it’s still a vast narrative canvas. And what works in a 900 page novel doesn’t necessarily translate to a three hour theatre piece. That is why the first half of this show feels as if it is trying too hard – short scenes, time shifts, big stage – and the story telling is, perhaps inevitably, fudgy, although the second act is more crisply focused. Moreover, adapter Philip Breen is keen to incorporate Russianness, feminisim, imperialism, topicality and a lot more so that if feels, in places, a bit like being banged on the head with a heavy samovar.
Anna Karenina has three main, but tightly interwoven, plot strands. First there’s the troubled marriage of Dolly (Naomi Seldon – suitably volatile) and Stiva (Jonnie Broadbent – good at pragmatic contrition). And the play opens with their quarrelling because he has seduced the governess. I enjoyed Breen’s careful inclusion of Tolstoy’s famous opening statement which is here given to a rueful, angry Dolly: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Then there’s the infidelity of Stiva’s sister Anna (Natalie Dormer – fine performance) whose marriage to senior government official Karenin (Tomiwa Edun) is dull but who adores her son. She is entranced by, and becomes a quasi wife, to an officer named Vronksy (Seamus Dillaine). Edun and Dillaine are both fine actors but each is miscast or misdirected. Karenin should be cold and unattractive but here he’s almost cuddly. Moreover he needs to be much older than Vronsky but isn’t in this interpretation. Vronksy, moreover, is really a bit of a cad but this version of him – asides to the audience notwithstanding – is just so damned reasonable that we end up sympathising with him and wishing Anna would stop all her self-indulgent soul searching.
Finally – although there is a lot more thematic underpinning, of course – we get Levin, who has some self-confessed history as a womaniser, but who is now desperately in love with Dolly’s sister Kitty whom he eventually marries and take home to his utopian country estate where he farms, the women make jam and we get warmly lit peasant scenes.
And the point (or one of them) behind these three stories is that men are routinely forgiven for sexual profligacy but women are not. Or at least they weren’t in Imperialist Russia amongst the noble classes.
Paddy Cunneen’s music played by a fine three piece band, led by MD Kotaro Hata on piano and accordion, adds a lot of atmosphere. There’s a mazurka when everyone’s at a ball and Akiko Ishikawa’s violin accompaniment to Kitty and Levin’s grandly staged wedding which opens the second half, is a musical delight. There is a mood music undercurrent to most scenes which works well too and I loved the grating glissandi during the death of Levin’s brother along with the whole cast, heads bowed, humming a minor key, very Russian sounding lament.
Trains are central to Anna Karenina. The 440 mile distance between Moscow and St Petersburg (think London to Edinburgh) has recently become do-able in just a few hours. They also symbolise new, changing technology and shifting social attitudes with a hint of decadence. Arguably, too, there is something phallic about trains in and out of tunnels and their climactic whistling. Breen and Cunneen have a lot of fun with this here – providing train music and whole cast rhythmic participation. And of course this story has a tragic, train-related ending but no spoilers in case you’re new to it.
There are some inexplicable oddities in this production which grate. Why, for example, in the horse riding scene do the cast start commenting in rhyme? And there are too many blackouts. On the other hand there are some brave, and pleasingly successful ideas such as the use of colloquial modern English throughout and British regional accents to connote social class and locational differences between characters.
Like almost anything Tolstoyan, this show is (very) good in parts but doesn’t always quite ground itself enough.
