Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by Ivan Turgenev, adapted by Brian Friel,
directed by Tadeusz Bradecki
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 11-October 6, 2007
"Idle Hands"
The Shaw Festival is offering theatre-goers a rare chance to see Ivan Turgenev’s best-known play, “A Month in the Country”, in a flawed though entertaining production. It is true that the Festival is using Brian Friel’s 1992 adaptation that he himself called a “very free version” of the original that unnecessarily inserts some Irish references. But the advantage is that the language is straightforward and clear and avoids the archaisms found in many translations. Friel also brings clarity to the characters and their relationships in a play that can sometimes seem overly complicated. Even if it is refracted through the eyes of another playwright, the play is intriguing in the way it anticipates so many of Chekhov’s themes forty years before that writer’s first major play. It is also fascinating in itself as a disillusioned mediation on the nature of love.
Turgenev wrote the play in 1850 but because of what was considered its attack on marriage, it was not performed until 1872. As in Chekhov’s four major plays, we find ourselves on a large estate in the middle of nowhere inhabited by an extended family of bored, wealthy people, their hangers-on and their servants. At the centre of the play is Natalya Petrovna, who is comfortable married to Arkady Sergeyevich Islayev, a man who uses the same words to praise the latest farm machinery as he does his wife’s appearance. Natalya already has a longtime admirer in the person of her husband’s best friend Michel. It is quite clear that Natalya and Michel are intellectually and emotionally closer than Natalya could ever be with Arkady.
When the play opens Michel has just returned after a month’s absence to find Natalya in a volatile mood. In probing into the cause he discovers to his chagrin that Natalya has fallen in love with Aleksey, her son’s new tutor, with whom her own adopted daughter Vera herself is in love. When Natalya finally convinces herself to pursue an affair with Aleksey, she alienates all those around her. Though the structure of the play could easily be labelled a tragedy, Turgenev called it a “comedy”, not merely because there is so much humour in it but because the action reveals love not as the selfless emotion people think it is but as an extended form of egotism. The characters are in love with what another person represents to them more than what that other person actually is.
For Natalya, who should be happy with both a husband and lover, Aleksey represents a last attempt to feel the excitement of youth. And here lies the production’s central flaw. Fiona Byrne, an actor I have repeated praised in these pages, is simply miscast as Natalya. Natalya should look as if she is old enough to be the mother of both Vera and Aleksey, but Byrne is blessed with youthful looks and figure and could easily pass as a contemporary of the two young people. This makes a romance between Natalya and Aleksey more likely but that is contrary to what the play is about. It also has the effect of removing any pity we might feel for Natalya’s desperation to be loved by a young man and makes us condemn her as no more than a voracious, egotistical creature.
This is all very unfortunate since in other circumstances Byrne gives what is an excellent performance. In great contrast to her ingénue roles in the past, Byrne plays a woman who in the midst of wealth and too much leisure has become neurotic. She is skittish, emotionally labile, seemingly only in command of herself when she sets out to deceive and even then condemns herself for such deception. Yet, in the central scene where Natalya wants Vera to pretend that they two are “sisters” so that she can worm secrets from Vera, Byrne and Marla McLean look so similar in age that Natalya’s ploy doesn’t have obvious insidiousness it should have.
Byrne is surrounded with the kind of fine ensemble work for which the Shaw Festival has become so renowned. David Jansen manages to garner our sympathy for Michel, who is, in fact, quite a disreputable character willing to betray his best friend and become a parasite in his household by somehow convincing himself of the nobility of his love for Natalya. We watch as is unease over her behaviour changes from true concern for her to wounded pride and anger when he realizes that Natalya has a new object of affection. In contrast, Blair Williams’ Arkady (especially in Friel’s version) comes off as a fool and mama’s boy, too absorbed by his own narrow interests even to notice that his wife is conducting more than one affair under his roof.
Martin Happer is well cast as Aleksey, a naive young man from a poor background, overawed to be in such fine surroundings as the Islayev estate and unaware of his rugged good looks and their effect on women. The finest male performance comes from Ric Reid as Doctor Shpigelsky, a man painfully conscious of the disdain with which the others regard him because of his descent from peasant stock. His response is to play the buffoon so that at least they laugh at him because of his own doing. It is one of Reid’s best ever performances with a wonderfully complex mixture of humour and pathos.
In this he is matched by Sharry Flett as Lizaveta, the hired companion to Arkady’s mother. It is fascinating to watch in her the struggle between a desire for independence and the routine self-belittling that quashes it. The totally anti-romantic courting scene between two such self-conscious middle-aged people as Shpigelsky and Lizaveta in Act 2 is the highpoint of the evening and is so exquisitely performed it alone is worth the price of admission.
Marla McLean is also excellent as Vera, who starts out as an innocent teenager but seems to age before our eyes from the hurt and betrayal she suffers during the action. Patricia Hamilton plays Anna Semyonovna Islayeva, Arkady’s mother, whose outward severity belies a more complex view of human relations than we first imagine. Moya O’Connell is fine as the lusty maid Katya but wears makeup that doesn’t suit the character or the period. David Schurmann is very funny as the German tutor Herr Schaaf, whose Freudian malapropisms may actually be intentional. Thom Marriott gives substance to the servant Matvey and his frustration with Katya’s coquettishness. And Michael Ball has never looked as dim-witted or comically unappealing as he does as Afanasy Ivanovich Bolshintsov, a rich peasant in love with Vera.
Peter Hartwell’s set consists almost entirely of louvered shutters, brown on one side for indoor scenes, painted with a garden scene on the other for outdoor scenes. The shutters cleverly reflect a society that is closed in on itself and the louvers suggest a world where everyone is engaged in spying on everyone else. Tadeusz Bradecki directs with customary clarity though he might have given more variety to staging the repeated situation in the play when a couple is suddenly surprised by a third party.
“A Month in the Country” is seldom staged in Canada. Its last professional production in Ontario was back in 1973 at the Stratford Festival when it was directed by William Hutt. For that reason alone anyone curious about Russian drama or Chekhov’s antecedents should not miss this production. Even if the central role is miscast, the production abounds in so many well-drawn character portraits that it will please anyone in the mood for an unflinching look at human foibles.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Fiona Byrne and Martin Happer. ©Michael Cooper.
2007-07-02
A Month in the Country