The stampede of actors making their method from display to stage continues with Natalie Dormer’s return to the boards because the lead, tragic determine in Leo Tolstoy’s story of 1 aristocratic sad household.
She is phenomenal within the a part of Anna, inhabiting the boldness, insecurity and anger of the discontented spouse in search of her freedom by way of romantic ardour. However there may be little chemistry in her relationship with Vronsky (Seamus Dillane) – the rakish army man for whom she leaves her loveless marriage, and he’s a non-character, left uncoloured.
Phillip Breen’s adaptation of the novel is nonetheless, at all times authentic, with out enjoying quick and unfastened with the story. There may be an impressed use of music, particularly within the sound of a weeping or skittering violin. It’s theatrically daring, with the ensemble sitting on regal seats when they don’t seem to be performing, and a unfastened, good-looking set, designed by Max Jones creates a way of desolated opulence.
Trendy language is ready towards the interval setting and gown. “Marriage, I’d slightly stick pins in my eyes,” says longsuffering spouse, Dolly (Naomi Sheldon), summing up the kernel of Tolstoy’s story in vernacular. The intention, it appears, is to convey these characters nearer dwelling to us.
However the emotional lifetime of the story appears slightly too surface-bound. Eventualities and relationships are infused with a excessive wire type of comedy which works to amuse, however it retains the drama from gathering tragic depths. And there are too many directorial tics and thrives that are intelligent however blithe.
The set has the sense of a kid’s nursery, with Dolly or Anna’s kids enjoying with toys round its edges. It’s considered one of Breen’s intelligent thrives, referring to the weaponising of youngsters inside marriage – specific within the case of Karenin (Tomiwa Edun), Anna’s spurned husband, who enacts his vengeance by way of their son, from whom Anna turns into forcibly estranged.
The manufacturing glows with the ambition of reflecting the total scope of the novel, from the period’s discoveries – electrical energy and trains – to social divides, to arguments round love v marriage, and the ethical relativism of Russia’s gilded the Aristocracy. Nevertheless it feels concurrently brisk and too lengthy, at three hours, in making an attempt to cowl a lot.
It strives to seize the psychological acuity of the novel too. Characters speak their emotions aloud so we hear what they really feel and what they are saying. It’s a heavy-handed approach to animate their interior worlds: a “telling” over dramatising, with an unsure be aware of comedy.
There’s a convincing fractiousness between untrue husband Stiva (Jonnie Broadbent, a mischievous wastrel), and Dolly; Sheldon provides a compelling efficiency of marital remorse, her end result an inverse parallel to Anna’s social shaming. Collectively the characters embody the catch-22 for girls marooned in dangerous marriages – they endure whether or not they stroll out or keep. However the trendy language sits awkwardly when it’s underlined in Dolly’s verbal meltdown, bringing a maelstrom of F-words in interior monologue.
The connection that sparks most on stage is that between Levin (based mostly on Tolstoy himself, performed by Dormer’s accomplice David Oakes) and Kitty (Shalisha James-Davis), from its humour to its tenderness.
Anna’s end result is foreshadowed from the beginning with a barrage of theatrical gadgets: music that mirrors the noise and pace of a prepare, a toddler’s wood prepare set on the entrance of the stage, and characters performing locomotive sounds, together with hoots that sound like screeches of ache. They lay out the bottom for Anna’s horrible finish throughout the prepare tracks. Besides right here, there may be solely a imprecise symbolic suggestion of it. Those that know the story will see the subtlety however these encountering it for the primary time could also be left with an approximate thought of what has occurred.
You don’t really feel its tragedy, maybe because of this, nor the vacancy of Karenin’s vengeance on Anna, which leaves his son bereft of maternal love. As a substitute, you admire the manufacturing for its generally sensible concepts.
