Richmond and Twickenham Times
February 25, 1994
By John Thaxter

Michael Redgrave's famous Guildford staging of "A Month in the Country", with Ingrid Bergman as a blameless Natalya helplessly in love with her son's young tutor, has served as a benchmark for the Turgenev classic for almost thirty years.

Its place is now confidently taken by Bill Bryden's definite new production, also beginning in Guildford.

A superlative cast of players is led by Helen Mirren's passionate, marvellously headstrong rustic chatelaine, John Hurt as her devoted but finally resentful admirer, Rakitin and Gawn Grainger as the patient, unjealous spouse.

Against semi-naturalistic settings by Hayden Griffin, hemmed in by a towering forest of birch trees, it again establishes Turgenev's romantic comedy of 1850 not just as starting point of modern drama, or as a dry-run for Chekhov and Ibsen, but as a peak achievement in its own right.

Turgenev was first to set all the effective action within the minds of his characters. Bryden's chambers opera approach cleverly turns thes play's potentially awkward interior monologues into the spoken equivalent of arias and recitatives.

A supremely romantic soliloquy comes as Mirren, nervously busy with a floral stole during a careful encounter with her ward and potential rival Vera, and then with Joseph Fiennes, as the youthful object of her mature passion, finds herself alone. Creamy shoulders bared, she feels free at last to launch into a gloriously enchanted, dreamily comic self-confession of love.

Bryden's placement of actors across the stage in vivid, essentially two-dimensional relationships, also adds a Mozartian zest to the trios and duets. Notably the comic garden scene in the rain, immediately following the interval, when John Standing's dull-dog doctor addresses unflattering marital overtures to Polly Adams' youngish old-maid; quickly followed by a duet for the youngsters; and then again for Mirren and the now emboldened young tutor.

Fiennes, a youthful actor of about the right age for the role, neatly develops the character from scene to scene. And his cocksure final appearance creates a perfect foil for John Hurt, superb as the embittered Rakitin, dismissively spitting out the word "skirt" as a male chauvinist equivalent of Nora's slamming door in "A Doll's House".

The production can be seen this week and the next at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre; it then comes to Richmond in the two weeks ending March 19th.

Kill for tickets!