Skip to main content

A Month In The Country. Brian Friel after Turgenev. Dir Richard Beecham. Chiswick, London. 2nd December 2006

We’re seated around four sides of a square stage, set up as a wood planked drawing room, and only two feet above the floor of the hall. In the front row we are so close to the actors we could reach out and touch them, and this intimacy creates a wonderful sense of sharing the room with them, listening and observing this Russian family. There is no need for projection, and the actors’ and voices are set at normal speech level which adds to the atmosphere of inclusion. This play is deeply ironic, and a masterful observation of human emotion and character. The actors are staggeringly well-rehearsed, and their facial expressions are natural throughout.

Beecham has directed this play in such a way as to make the doctor likeable, Michel quite melodramatic, and Natalya more hysterical than I pictured from my reading of the paper text. There is more spirit on show. There is much laughter from the audience at the irony, even, most inappropriately when it is tragic, as much of it is. On paper, this play can be read as a piercingly accurate, and sympathetic, insight into human nature. It is a heart-rending tale of duplicity, betrayal, and self-sacrifice on the part of Vera. Vera’s character is wonderfully played, with humour and fresh vitality at the outset, altering to awareness and maturity as she learns that her ardent admiration of the young tutor, Aleksey, is unreturned, that her guardian is weak and treacherous, and that her childhood is over. She appears to cast away her life by marrying an old farmer with neighbouring land, but does this with great dignity and wisdom, her washed out mien, her red-eyed appearance, from genuine sobbing, and her poise lending her grace, even in defeat.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running ‘till your nipples bleed

An email from a friend of mine arrives; she complains that, at work, she is routinely subjected to gruesome accounts of female colleagues’ intimate medical procedures and gynaecological problems. I am all commiseration because I, too, have had years of listening to workplace chats about periods, childbirth and sex lives. Oh please. Later, I wander off for a walk in the early evening sunshine and it is so silent and so beautiful that I flop down on the grass and lay awhile gazing out over the rolling fields, and the mouth of the river, and fall into a reverie. Two men pass by. A few minutes later sounds of women’s talk float nearer and, by the time the two females of the species draw level with me, I have risen up from my deliciously recumbent position in the meadow, alert and tense, something like a meerkat. “I do feel for her. Going down that IVF route is such an emotional roller coaster. I was never prepared for how terrible it was going to be.” I remain frozen in my meerkat position...
Post a Comment
Read more

GLORIOUS 39. Dir Stephen Poliakoff. 2009

Glorious 39 strips away illusions. Poliakoff presents the apparent idyll of an English aristocratic family headed by genteel patriarch Lord Keyes (Bill Nighy). He presides over a country estate in Norfolk and his elegant townhouse in London – a world of golden light, romantic ruins, servants, house parties and happy children. But this is 1939, a mere 21 years since the Great War, the war to end all wars, in which millions died, Britain was crippled with war debt, and the English country house system which he so values was almost annihilated. There are many references to the ancientness of his family and tradition, but now, few male servants remained alive or unmaimed to work the English landscape or to be in service to the old families. Fearing domestic and political upheaval, appeasers such as Keyes sought to prevent Churchill leading the country and taking Britan to war, and to buy off Hitler to preserve British cultural and national identity. Nighty is excellent, contro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ian McEwan. Amsterdam. London: QPD, 1998

McEwan’s novel about ambition, personal betrayal and revenge features Clive, a modern composer trying to complete a major orchestral work, his friend Vernon, an editor trying to save his ailing newspaper, and Garmony, an unscrupulous right-wing politician on the rise. In common, all three have, in previous years, been lovers of recently dead Molly. They meet at her funeral and the story follows the next few weeks of the men’s lives. Vernon and Clive act as one another’s conscience, each infuriating the other. Which is more important, honesty, friendship and trust or Vernon’s newspaper and Clive’s symphony? The novel presents the difficulties of balancing personal and public morality, the importance of private shame and public reputation, the conflict between taking a moral decision for the greater good, or putting first ones own desires. Not just a simple exposé of a politician with a vulnerable side, Amsterdam is full of double standards and surprises, and takes a long, cynical look a...
Post a Comment
Read more