Review: A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY, Donmar Warehouse

Photo credit: Helen Murray

If hearts are trumps then Brian Friel’s take on Turgenev's A Month in the Country is a winning hand.

Can Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, written in the early 1850s, resonate with today’s audiences? It certainly can in the case of Lyndsey Turner’s direction of Friel’s reworking, which retains the Russian setting while lending the dialogue an Irish cadence.

A Month in the Country unfolds across a single restless summer in the household of Arkady Islayev (Thomas Arnold), a landowner absorbed in his estate. His wife, Natalya (Sophie Okonedo), bored and unsettled by her comfortable life, finds her attention seized by the arrival of Aleksey (Patrick Gibson), the new young tutor hired to teach her son.

Michel Rakitin (Alistair Petrie), the family's devoted friend, watches Natalya's sudden fixation while struggling with his own, unrequited, attachment to her. To complicate matters further, Natalya’s ward Vera (Rachelle Diedericks) has also fallen for Aleksey.

The action, such as it is, starts with Natalya’s mother-in-law Anna (Susan Brown) and two others whiling away the summer’s day playing cards. Natalya proposes a different sort of game, suggesting to Michel that they play at ‘polishing’ Aleksey. 

Card games only succeed if everyone agrees to play by the rules, and work with the chance hand they are dealt: it is Natalya’s undoing that her trying to control how everyone else plays her game is doomed to fail. 

Okonedo as Natalya is superb, initially very much in control - telling others to ‘sit there’ or ‘leave now’ - then slowly sliding from ennui to despair as not only does her little game get out of hand, but also her feelings for Aleksey become more serious.

In her desperation, Natalya agrees to the matchmaking Doctor Shpigelsky’s (Daniel Rigby) scheme to marry Vera off to the wealthy, dull neighbour Bolshintsov (Michael Hodgson). Rigby is in fine form, presenting the Doctor’s (bad) court jester as a cover up for his contempt of the gentry, and Hodgson poignantly presents a man who has never known love. 

When learning of the marriage scheme, Vera quickly has to grow up and Diedericks has one of the most affecting moments of the evening when revealing her fears of what marriage might entail.

Although Natalya’s love triangle is the core of the story, this is an ensemble piece, with other affairs of the heart interwoven throughout and all convincingly portrayed. When Doctor Shpigelsky declares, if not love, then at least security, to resident companion Lizaveta, Amanda Wilkin beautifully carries through her earlier announcement during the card game of only having one heart to play.

As the household domestic workers, Katya and Matvey, Jessica Brindle and Jonathan Livingstone show how love can be enjoyed when not weighed down by upper class norms and expectations.

While it is never quite clear why Herr Schaaf is a house guest, Mark Hadfield makes the most of delivering his malapropisms.

Arkady may seem preoccupied with his building work and new-fangled machinery. His insistence that he is building a weir not a dam, not only adds to Friel’s melding of the Russian and the Irish, but Arnold suggests that his character is less oblivious to what is going on and that while he may not be able to stop the household’s surge of emotions, he can at least stem them.

Brown, as Arkady’s mother Anna quietly watching everything, has a touching scene with her son revealing the issues there had been in her own marriage. 

Aleksey, after briefly getting caught up by Natalya, comes to his senses and leaves. Gibson brings charm and an Irish brogue to this part. 

Michel is the one most hurt by Natalya’s machinations, and Petrie makes him a solid, if saddened, foil to Okonedo’s mood swings, summing everything up with the observation that love makes the unreasonable seem reasonable.

The play’s several triangles having tightened around each other, loosen with Aleksey’s departure, and towards the end, Anna returns with her playing cards: the household is back in its old shape. 

Leslie Travers’ design is stunning, with it never being entirely clear whether the action is taking place inside or outside, and the stage surrounded by a raised and lowered glass and brass cube. Are the characters living in a closed ecosystem and we are scientists watching what happens when that system is perturbed (by the arrival of Aleksey)?

Lyndsey Turner’s direction keeps everything moving along at a pace that reflects the longueurs of summer without ever dragging.

A Month in the Country is a bitter-sweet exploration of heart over head and a delight from start to finish.

**** Four stars

Reviewed by: Mike Askew

A Month in the Country plays at the Donmar Warehouse until 3 Oct, with further info here.