A Month in the Country
If it looks like a Chekhov play and it pines wistfully in the pre-revolution Russian countryside like a Chekhov play… that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a Chekhov play.
Sure, Lyndsey Turner’s deft revival of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country uses a not un-Chekhovian 1992 translation from Brian Friel; okay the bulrushes on Leslie Travers’ set could have been recycled from last year’s Barbican Seagull; yes it’s a story about a sprawling cast of dysfunctional aristocrats and their hangers-on falling apart on a country estate. But even in spite of all that, a little time with the play reveals it to in fact be very much its own thing.
At the heart of this particular country estate is Sophie Okonedo’s jaded aristo Natalya Petrova. Legally, even wealthy women lacked real power in 19th century Russia. And yet even if Natalya doesn’t have any particularly grand ambitions, her flinty force of will, elegant looks and scorched-earth approach to anyone who annoys her means the teeming denizens of the house bend to her whim and hang on her mood. She is a much more forceful presence than her technology-obsessed husband Arkady (Thomas Arnold), who spends his days cheerily prattling around with his unreliable new winnowing machine, oblivious to the fact his pal Michel (Alistair Petrie) is in love with his wife, and that she has designs on their daughter’s tutor Aleksey (Patrick Gibson)
Although there is a moment where Daniel Rigby’s sublimely annoying doctor Ignaty drops his loser...