Monthly Archives: June 2025

A WILD NIGHT WITH COUNT TOLSTOY

      Even those who haven’t read Tolstoy’s great novel  know about the train under which the despairing Anna will die.   So it  dominates from the start:   Philip Breen,  adaptor and director , threads the excitement, innovation and terror of Russia’s late-19c railway revolution through this show from the start:  some rather wonderful train-whistles blendwith screams, from the whole ensemble, and often poor little Seryozha is seen playing with a toy train often below the stage. Which is at the same time nursery, drawing-rooms, ballroom, country estate and station – its two rocking-horses becoming at one point even the racetrack,   where Vronsky flings himself on his damaged horse and Anna flings herself on him in turn. 

     There’s contrast between Max Jones’ set and Ruth Hall’s costumes  – wonderfully, gilded old-Russian bourgeois wealth – and the occasional rapid, disconcerning symbolic mass movement (by Ayse Tashiran) .  That’s rather engaging: from mazurka to mayhem in seconds,  a lonely light on mother and son,  or on Kitty collapsing at her snub by Vronsky,  or a sudden emptied space as Karenin and Anna speak their thoughts aside in the dying marriage.

        Staging such a dense, multi-character novel doesn’t, at that pace, offer much chance for character to build.  Natalie Dormer’s Anna is dignified, preoccupied, suddenly drawn to Seamus Dillane’s dashing soldierly Vronsky;  but oddly, it is Tomiwa Edun’s Karenin whose stiff unhappiness and confusion feel more real.   Angry Naomi Sheldon and Johnnie Broadbent (nicely reprehensible, laddish) feel more real than the central lovers ever do, and so does Shalisha JAmes-Davis’ kittenish Kitty.  David Oakes has the hardest job as Levin,  patron saint of anxious overthinkers and  the only one of them who, like Tolstoy himself, realizes that all this new technology is going to upset the Russian applecart for good.  

        By the break – it’s a chunky 3 hrs 10 with interval – my main feeling was that this was a great big Fabergé egg:  decorative ,  evocative,  complicated with sharp glittering  scene-changes and bursts of gripping Russian chant.  An interesting way to make a big novel fit the stage, but oddly unsatisfying (my companion, who claims her romantic weeping history owes it all to the book)  felt the same.  You can’t make an emotional human omelette out of a Fabergé egg: even Anna’s wild childbed hysteria, shouting for both her Alexeis, doesn’t move the heart. That’s to throw no shade on Dormer, who puts everything into it,    it’s just too abrupt. 

   The mood changes sharply in the second half when, among other things, electricity comes to Russia in the symbolic, surreal and confusing  form of a lot of neon tubes pointing down like cage bars.   This somehow sends all the couples into ferocious, distraught marital shouting,  as if inspired by foreseeing  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and, indeed, EastEnders.    Kitty rants at Levin,,    Anna at both Karenin and Vronsky  and, in quite my favourite scene,  Dolly vents her fury at  woman’s lot and being married to poor selfish Stiva,   and then carries on doing it alone aboard a cart (smallest rocking-horse recruited)  driven by old Petka. He is Les Dennis, what a gem  of casting and what a fine beard,  and hilariously maintains peasant stoicism as, in Breen’s ultra-free translation, Dolly screams about the “fucking fucking fuck fucking” fate of femaleness.   

      Tolstoy had a point there, for his time, though Anna herself emerges as always having been a disaster waiting to happen.     And altogether, combined with Kitty’s shrill unreasonableness and Anna’s needy demands for the “morphine” of  Vronsky’s  verbal devotion,   empathy disintegrates. The great shining curate’s Fabergé-egg breaks, and there’s nothing to treasure in its velvet heart.

       Well, maybe that’s the point.  But I can’t deny that Breen keeps our breathless attention all right,  for three hours plus,.   Even if at times one would have liked a breather,  to hang on to a new thought worth keeping. 

cft.org.uk  to 28 June

rating 3

PHYSICAL, PIRATICAL, PLAYFUL

      All aboard the Jolly Todger, where Long John Silver’s parrot Alexa (she comes from the Amazon, get it?) keeps accidentally  ordering unwanted Chinese lanterns.  But she comes into her own when she flies down and picks up the second treasure map on Skeleton Island.

        There’s something comfortingly British in Le Navet Bête’s four-man mixture of cleverness, sharp timing and clowning ridiculousness,  as it cavorts disrespectfully round a classic national treasure for two hours.  There’s enough of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original for the audience to spend the interval happily doing “Aharrrr Jim Lad!” at one another,  but it veers off  happily in many directions, teasing the front row panto-style and even at one point lurching into vaudeville crosstalk   about three sailors called Who, Why, and I-dont-know. 

     So we get the Admiral Benbow pub,  and see Blind Pew deliver the dread Black Spot  to Billy Bones,   but then hit a dockside version of Play Your Cards Right with Matt Freeman in tight lurex as the lovely assistant. Bald lanky Freeman’s taste for wriggling , pouting drag and camp  is proven further as a fabulously flapping mermaid who talks fluent whale,  a sailor in a cropped Gaultier T-shirt or – in the really shakingly funny second act –  an Australian version of marooned Ben Gunn, in one flip flop and one wellie while his tame gorilla puppeteers his imaginary wife made of coconut-shells and raffia.     

        The navêteers are an established troupe, often surfacing around Christmas and holiday times with anything from this to King Arthur or Dracula.   John Nicholson writes and directs,  Fi Riussell’s set and Matt Freeman’s costumes are lovingly detailed (the wigs alone are worth it, from Billly Bones’ alarming rat-tails to the candy-striped mermaid and whatever that is Ben Gunn has on his head).   There are enough self-aware fake-mistakes to rouse the audience to actual cheers – physical comedians must end up with a lot of bruises.   Al Dunn’s Long John Silver develops a nice line in weary sarcasm about it all.  And before the finale becomes a chorus from Cheers and a blast of “In the Navy!”  in tighty whitey shorts,  there is a  viciously funny joke  about “the journey” for our hippyish age.    They deserve all the hysteria they got.  

New Wolsey to 14 June

then touring to 5 Oct  –   Oxford, Wakefield, Exeter,Minack, Salisbury, Barnstaple 

rating 4

WHY RATTIGAN COUNTS

Quite a rare outing for this very late Terence Rattigan play, written after his star had fallen under the assault of mouthy Osborne, Amis and the  “angry young men” who dismissed him  as lightweight middleclass entertainment,  irrelevant to the horrors and rages of a troubled world. . Which was never really fair, and seems ever less so given this play’s striking last scenes in which a husband lays out, mercilessly, his horrified compassion at the experinces of his Estonian refugee wife.  Puts Jimmy Porter’s  misogynistic whining in its place.

      It begins as drawing-room domestic  comedy with a 1960’s  political edge: tetchy Sebastian the literary critic  (Dominic Rowan) is a fellow-traveller  Marxist leftie intellectual , grumbling  at his patient wife Lydia and badmouthing their friend Mark, a glitzy American bestselling novelist who holds a candle for her.   Equal contumely falls on any mention of their son Joey, a nicely vigorous Joe Edgar,   for joining the Liberal party – “vote splitters!”  cries his father.   But Joey has had a play bought for BBC2 , and tomorrow the four  must all watch together (ah, the dear dead days of appointment-to-view TV!).  

        There are  secrets unevenly shared, in a inspired  by the marriage of Rex Harrison who concealed his terror for a sick  wife under breezy grumpiness towards her. Lydia proudly shows Sebastian a reassuring report from her doctor, but confides the truth to Mark: thanks to her cunning wartime ability to read documents upside down in a hurry, she knows perfectly well that she is dying,  just doesnt want Sebastian to know or worry. She is even  artfully encouraging his affair with another woman, her probable replacement. Claire Price,  doing justice to  one of the most gruellingluy talkative of roles, gives Lydia an authentic steely edge: here’s  an determined, emotionally generous survivor realist, prattling, excoriating bad vodka, putting up with Sebastian’s fuss goodhumouredly,  but opening up safely to faithful Mark about love before ideas, people before “things”.   

        Her longing for her husband and son to become close is touching, reaching a peak later;  but the confident young adult enrages his Dad over politics every time they meet,  having shrewdly observed that there’s something very old-imperial Tory about his uncompromising send-in-the tanks Stalinism.  There are two significant chess games.

      Emotional melodrama erupts in the second half, as Sebastian misses the TV show  – we get a glimpse of its dour  political youth-anger on a nicely period b&w telly – and disaster befalls Lydia’s attempt to cover up his dereliction. But then,  as the two older men confront one another,  Rattigan’s play takes its powerful swerve.   We may have long suspected that Sebastian secretly knows about Lydia’s awful prognosis and is, in parallel,  trying to spare her . Because for all his clenched British reluctance to show emotion  he knows every detail of her story of being “untermensch”,  herded to mass graves by the Nazis and then traded sexually by the Russians.   Death had been too close too long and now, crazily misunderstanding her strength, he thinks he can hide the bad medical news from her.. 

        There’s a wonderful unspoken parallel between the general, timeless British avoidance of emotion – which Lydia had earlier decried – and the way that for decade, indeed during my childhood and teens,   despite awareness of the Jewish Holocause little of WW2’s other atrocity was ever spoken of .  It was, after all,  only fifteen years since the Allies sold out the Poles and Balts at Yalta. 

       But here’s good old Rattigan reminding a generation,  while all Jimmy Porter could manage is bullying his wife and throwing a permanent class-war tantrum

Orangetreetheatre.co.uk.   To 5 July

rating 4