The Sunday Times
April 3, 1994
By Robert Hewison

A new production of A Month in the Country avoids both sentiment - and subtlety, says Robert Hewison

In the opening moments of his 'comedy in five acts', "A Month in the Country", which has just opened in a new production by Bill Bryden at the Albery, Turgenev gives a tiny, but significant hostage to fortune. Natalya, played by Helen Mirren, is draped on a chaise longue while her intimate freind, Rakitin (John Hurt), reads aloud from Dumas's novel "The Count of Monte Christo". He breaks off to ask if she finds it interesting. "Not at all," she replies. Then why, he asks, should they be reading it? The answer is, in order to say that the book has been read, but the idle exchange raises the question: why do we want to go to see "A Month in the Country", and do we find it at all interesting?

Do we go because Turgenev has an established place in Anglo-European culture as the forerunner of Chekhov, the Russian playwright so popular with us as to be virtually English? Do we go because the title alone summons up images of wooden verandas and linen, of nostalgia for a social world evoked by associates with films by Merchant Ivory or BBC classic serials? Do we go because we wish to see the stars, who are made glamorous, but also increasingly remote, by celluloid and television screens? Do we go because these characters, in the rural Russia of the 1840s, might have something to say?

Turgenev obviously thought the latter. There is an element of autobiography in the character of Ratikin, who acts as the wealthy Natalya's walker, welcomed by her husband, Arkady (Gawn Grainger), who is far too busy on his estate to pay her the attentions that Ratikin does. Turgenev played a similar tolerated admirer in the house of an opera singer. Turgenev loved his singer, and Ratikin loves Natalya, but neither man appears ever to have got round to doing anything about it. John Hurt's slightly puffy, lived-in face suggests a nearly-man, a not-quite who would give Natalya's husband no grounds for suspicion.

Mirren and Hurt's relationship is never consummated, nor is anybody else's. The play is a whole series of disappointed wooings. The servant (Peter Sproule) proposes to the maid, Katya (Biddy Hudson), who has to fend off a pass from the German tutor (John Grillo). An elderly wealthy landowner (Trevor Ray) comes in pursuit of Natalya's 17-year-old ward, Vera (Anna Livia Ryan). The go-between in this affair, the local doctor (John Standing), proposes to Lizaveta (Polly Adams), the compagnion to Natalya's mother-in-law (Gillan Raine).

The most important failure of all is the relationship between Natalya and the gauche young student (Joseph Fiennes) who has a vacation job as a second tutor to her son. Natalya falls in love with him, falls in love, she says, "for the first time", but though flattered and almost persuaded to reciprocrate, he eventually decides he must leave.

The play, however, is more than a melancholy Mills and Boon. Turgenev could not get the text past the Russian censor because of what it said about the conventional attitudes of the day. While there is nothing "political" in the play, Turgenev, as Isaiah Berlin has said, was aware of "a vast social mutation of some kind" taking place in Russia. When Natalya tells Ratikin that they are both "unhealthy", the sickness is a social one.

Under a profoundly repressive regime, literature had become a medium for social and political criticism. One of the reasons why Turgenev, like Chekhov, has been popular in Britain is that here, too, literary criticism and arguments about the uses of culture have stood in for a debate that is in fact sociological.

Class is one of the reasons why the tutor, in Fiennes's performance very much still a boy with the children, and deeply deferential to his employers, cannot adequately respond to Natalya's feelings. The educated Ratikin, in a famous phrase of Turgenev's, a "superfluous man" is no danger. The tutor is a member of a new class, the intelligentsia. From this class - though, in Fiennes's characterisation, not from this particular member - come the stirrings of revolution.

The most overt social criticism comes in a remarkable outburst from the doctor, who reveals in his cynicism and envy at the end of his brutally matter-of-fact wooing of Lizaveta. The mask of geniality and concern slips to uncover anger at his poor childhood and the rich ladies he must attend. He is the only character to gain anything during the play, three horses as a reward for his pandering.

The question, however, is do we find this interesting? If we went to the Albery to experience that enticing, nostalgic step back into a lost social world that is such a part of the heritage aesthetic, we would be disappointed. Hayden Griffin's set looks decidedly low-rent, with sparsely furnished interiors. For a wealthy family, the Islaevs do not appear to have acquired many material posessions. Only Deirdre Clancy's costumes give any sense of the social milieu of the play.

The real difficulty, however, is the complete lack of erotic charge between Mirren and Hurt. Mirren is rather more than the 29 called for in the script, which makes her indecision petulant rather than appealing. It is not that we expect Natalya and Ratikin to have done anything, it is the thought that they want to, but cannot or dare not, that makes the relationship exciting, and therefore interesting. As director, Bryden appears to have decided so firmly not to fall into the trap of what the English think of as wistful Chekhovian longings that characters practically bite each other's head off.

This is most marked in Mirren, who begins by treating the character of Natalya as a rehearsal for Hedda Gabler, rather than one of Chekhov's softer heroines. She switches from emotion to emotion, signalling each change with the subtlety of a semaphore. She provokes laughter, but it is against, not with her.

This limits the credibility of the character: at no point was I convinced that Natalya felt anything for either her old or her new fancy. Without this tragic possibility, there is no movement or change in her, one of the basic drives of drama.

This lack is compensated for by Anna Livia Ryan's moving performances as Vera. At the beginning she really does seem a girl, but having experienced emotional blackmail at the hands of Natalya, she becomes, in her own words, "a woman, a woman like you". It is her tragedy that, thwarted in her love for the young tutor, she decides that she may well make an even worse version of Natalya's mistake, and marry her rich old landowner.

In spite of the tragic nature of most of the events, Turgenev called his play a comedy, and Bryden's production gets lots of laughs. In general, a comedy ends with everyone married, and a tragedy ends with everyone dead. That in "A Month in the Country" nobody gets married, and everyone dies a little, is one of the many subtle ironies that this production misses.