Ivan Turgenev’s play, which was first seen in 1872, presaged Chekhov by placing Russia’s wealthy class centre stage. He, too, was fascinated with how its privileged classes wiled away empty summer days in the country.
The works are often described as plotless. But there is nothing more tense than the upheaval of a seemingly permanent status quo.
In this 1991 translation by Brian Friel that process has already started when we first encounter Sophie Okonedo’s Natalya. With a permanent thousand-yard stare she coveys a weary impatience with Michel (Alistair Petrie) who has long been in love with her despite being her husband’s closest friend.
Things have been brought to a head by the arrival of Aleksey (Patrick Gibson), the fit – in both senses – new tutor to Natalya’s son, for whom Natalya has fallen despite the decades between their ages.
Without Aleksey’s presence life would doubtless plod along unchanged in relative contentment. Natalya would be bored to literal tears by the neglect of her husband Arkady (Thomas Arnold). The seemingly permanent visitor Herr Schaaf (Mark Hadfield), a German aristocrat who manages to mistranslate most things into sexual innuendo, would continue to be tolerated. But with Aleksey’s arrival a crueller side to this want-for-nothing class is revealed, most dramatically with Natalya who humiliates her adopted 17-year-old daughter Vera (an excellent Rachelle Diedericks) because she has become a rival for Aleksey’s affections. Despite an impressive cast, Lindsey Turner’s compact production amounts to less than the sum of its considerable parts.
The impressive Daniel Rigby plays the self-hating, dad-joking doctor Shpigelsky like a music-hall act. For the payment of three horses and a carriage he becomes matchmaker, hitching Vera to his paymaster, a rich, revolting local landowner. Yet the tragedy of this situation is lost in the misplaced tone of Rigby’s scenes. His regret is only skin deep. Apart from for Diedericks’ poised Vera and Petrie’s deeply pained Michel it is difficult to care about the fate of these Russians. Even Okonedo’s Natalya comes across as more high maintenance than tragically unhappy.
A Month in the Country
Donmar Warehouse
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