A Month in the Country

With a fantastic cast led by Sophie Okonedo this was always going to be an interesting evening at the Donmar Warehouse.    This adaptation of Turgenev's play was reworked by Brian Friel in the 1990s, but it still has the bare bones of pretty much any 19th century Russian play.  It's set in a country estate where family and friends are spending the summer with their staff, including the poor but bright and dashing young tutor Aleksey.  From the very start we are made aware of romantic entanglements,  Michel (Alistair Petrie) is both a friend to Natalya and her husband, but is also in love with Natalya.  Vera, the young ward of Natalya has also fallen for Aleksey (Patrick Gibson).  Meanwhile, the local GP, Shpigelsky (Daniel Rigby), may be pursuing Lizaveta (Amanda Wilkin) in a very pragmatic way whilst also pursuing Vera on behalf of an older local neighbour, Bolshintsov (Michael Hodgson) in return for promise of some horses.  And there is also an on/off flirtation going on between two of the servants whilst Herr Schaaf (Mark Hadfield) is pretty cringingly interested in any woman he can catch.   The only people not actively looking for romance are Natalya's husband Arkady (Thomas Arnold) who is more interested in technical innovation on the farm, and his mother, Anna..    So, this is clearly going to get messy, and the trigger for this is both Natalya and Vera in pursuit of Aleksey the tutor.

So far, this is built like a farce or sex comedy, and in many ways this is the way the play is designed, with many entrances and exits through a single door and with plenty of misunderstandings as passion explodes in inconvenient places.  It is definitely funny and they play into the comic vibes, but overall this has a slightly weird tone, as there is also an underlying tragic and sometimes melodramatic edge to a lot of this too, picking up sometimes on the ennui, melancholy and self deception usually to be found in a Russian 19th century play.  I also felt that some of the funny lines landed with a bit of a thud, rather than the sparkle of laughter they probably deserved and I wonder if that was also to do with the tone of the piece overall.  I also didn't get the point of the two solitary voiceover interior monologues for Natalya and Michel, which seemed to me to just go over ground that already seemed pretty obvious, and didn't add any comic or dramatic tension.  

There's a lot of class tension going on in this, with the entitled boredom of the upper class family in counterpoint to the scrabbling to climb up the social ladder that can be seen in the various lower classes, most obviously by Shpigelsky, whilst Aleksey is the one who is most torn between the possibilities of a love match with one of the two women of higher class, versus rejecting them to take a higher moral ground. But all of the characters are highly cognisant of their place in their society.  

The cast were all magnificent of course, and I particularly enjoyed Mark Hadfield's performance as Herr Schaff, spouting maalapropisms at every opportunity.  Daniel Rigby was funny, cynically playing the fool with terrible jokes to entertain his aristocratic clients, trying  to shape the humour to fit his audience.  And Sophie Okonedo was of course always drawing the eye whenever on stage, but, whether intentionally or not I found her character a bit too self indulgent for me to sympathise with her.  She also stands out in terms of costume, which is gorgeously and stylishly understated, whilst the rest of the set and costume are subtly within period. The set generally was pretty verdant, and that worked well, even when there were tables and sofas for drawing room scenes but I was a bit uncertain about the set device of having a heavily planted cage that rises and falls for each set change - I am sure it was supposed to say something but I am not sure what. 

The play ruminated on love and marriage, and the ethics and morality surrounding it, and played that out between the bored upperclasses and the lower classes scraping with elbows out to climb the social ladder, but the ending, with pretty much everyone disappointed in some way or another left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.   I read reviews afterwards and it seems to be very highly regarded.  I am probably in a minority then in that I enjoyed it overall, with those fab performances and I had an entertaining evening, but I really wouldn’t push it as far as love.