Evening Standard
30 March, 1994
By Nicholas de Jongh

People visiting country houses often do the indecent thing and fall in love with all the wrong people. In Ivan Turgenev's "A Month in the Country", the 19th century stage's most sardonic warning on the dangers of sexual passion, it takes just four days for one male visitor to break a love triangle and two female hearts.

Comic, tragic or a bit of both? Bill Bryden's assured production, although never trying to win cheap laughs, steers too clear of the right pathos and pain. And though Helen Mirren is there to give her all, or some of it, both she and John Hurt seem constantly underwhelmed.

Turgenev subtitled his play a comedy. And with some reason. This vision of the Russian gentry in slow decline depends upone the unprincipled person of 29-year-old Natalya Petrovna.

Long since bored of her land-owning husband, she keeps his friend Rakitin on the estate as her enthralled companion. John Hurt's Rakitin wears the hang-dog look of a man for whom being tantalised has become a vocation. Everything about him is dry, limp and crumpled.

Into this backwater, there comes Joseph Fiennes's assured Belyaev, young tutor for Natalya's son. He is the Theatre's first modern sex symbol and a model student from the new intelligentsia. And when Natalya and her teenage ward, Vera, fall for this superman, Turgenev begins to fashion an anti-romantic comedy of embarrassment: Natalya pursues the bemused tutor with the reckless enthusiasm of a woman who has nothing left to lose, caring little for her admirer's jealousy. Passion is a cruel and humiliating business.

So the notes of comedy inexorably give way to Rakitin's grief. He is the play's inscrutable watcher. Ironic and becalmed, he conceals his passion until a late outburst - expressing the play's conviction that love leads to suffering.

On Hayden Griffin's appealing stage set, Mirren and Hurt conduct the battle of wills. Both are rather too mature for their roles: Bryden's production centres upon middle-aged hankering rather than youthful desiring. Miss Mirren's cold, clever performance makes of Natalya an egotistical, adult-child, used to having whomever she wants.

She treats Ratikin like an old pet, discarded in favour of a new puppy. This puppy as played by Joseph Fiennes is a little short on sexual charisma and comic confusion. But the affect of Mirren's performance is to make Natalya's pursuit ridiculous rather than pathetic. John Hurt's Ratiking, frigidly detached, never convinces that he adores Natalya or suffers excrutiating jealousy. His performance, however acerbic and ironic, is too cool for its good or ours.

Although Bryden misses the right emotional nuances, the performances on the periphery hit home. John Standing as the disreputable old doctor Shpigelsky, Gawn Grainger as a husband who guesses the worst and Anna Liva Ryan's Vera, spitting fury and grief, speak powerfully for Russia's old order and the better new world for which Turgenev hoped in this glorious play.