Marriage is whoredom with a licence.’ What made Tolstoy’s 1889 novella ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ so shocking originally was its punchy disdain for established institutions, and its open discussion of sex and prostitution. Today, it’s the work’s misogyny that appals – and the scabrous precision with which its protagonist Pozdnyshev outlines, one by one, the ways in which women disgust him.
These range from a repulsive description of his first visit to a brothel to the horror he feels watching his wife eating a boiled egg. Tolstoy wrote this semi-autobiographical story at his lowest ebb, worn down by financial troubles and a miserable relationship with his much younger wife, Sophia. It’s a whining caricature of female-kind which deserves to be crushed under the heel of his compassionate masterpiece ‘Anna Karenina’. So why put it on stage? Director John Terry’s production doesn’t provide any clear answers.
Greg Hicks plays Pozdnyshev with a gentle note of self-parody, but lacks the energy to sustain us through 90 minutes of tormented bile. He falls in love with his wife’s musical talents, but his wish to encourage them leads her to catastrophe. His descent into violent madness is accompanied by the sounds of the Beethoven work his wife and oldest friend play together: represented on stage by two musicians, who play the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ on piano and violin.
The unexpected violence of Beethoven’s music makes for moments of seething intensity, as Pozdnyshev’s fury builds to a crescendo. And Nancy Harris’s adaptation is a credit to Tolstoy’s legendary powers of observation, full of careful, sensuous details. But these things aren’t enough to justify staging this story, now. Tolstoy always wanted to be remembered as a playwright, as well as a great novelist: this play is a lesson to be very, very careful what you wish for.