Kenneth Hurren on Turgenev's tedious trifles
A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev (Chichester Festival Theatre) In The Seagull the novelist Character, Trigorin, speaks his own epitaph: "An interesting writer but. not as good as Turgenev." I like to think of Chekhov genially throwing in this compliment to his distinguished forerunner, partly in acknowledgement of his own debt to the man, and perhaps partly because he sensed that there would come a day when people would be saying of poor Turgenev himself that he was "an interesting writer, but not as good as Chekhov." For, While conceding that Ivan Turgenev did not seriously aspire to the theatre and wrote his plays only for the printed page, the truth of the assessment is freshly demonstrated every time anyone falls to the temptation presented by a graceful and sardonic prose style and puts A Month in the Country O n a stage. It is a work, I fear, that will always prompt the wags to distressInglY obvious little jokes about its seeming "more like a year" or should be "cut by a week." There are agreeable moments in it — a Sardonically perceptive observation here, a flirtation with Poignancy there — but Turgenev is never wholly in dramatic control of his material, and in the business of orchestrating the enervating bore5orn that seems to have characterlsed life on all the country estates of
nineteenth-century Russia, he never quite mastered, as Chekhov did, the trick of writing stimulatingly about tedious people. Again, though the play has never quite deserved John Buchan's off-hand description of it as a tale "about a dreary hag in love with a youth" (any more than Chekhov's own Three Sisters deserved Mme Litvinov's dismissal of it as an absurd play about grown-up women who spend four acts not going to Moscow when they have the price of a ticket), its chief concerns are apt to seem trifling. It is really awfully difficult not to think, well, yes, but I've troubles enough of my own. I am not one to speak lightly of a lady's passions, but to have Natalya Petrovna mooning away for three hours with the vapours over her son's handsome young tutor is so fatiguing as to put a strain on the patience of the most sympathetic auditor.
Far from being a "dreary hag", Natalya, in Turgenev's text, is actually but twenty-nine, but it is of course, impossible to have her seem nearly so young (the general tenor of her predicament is to suggest that women went off rather quickly in 1850, at least in Russia), since she is on about life having passed her by and generally convinced that she can never know passion again. On the other hand, to move her to the vicinity of forty, and thus make her sentiments more reasonable (except, no doubt, to women of forty), is to bring her dangerously close to something from Colette. It may be that this would not be entirely a bad thing. There were times at Chichester when my mind wandered off to ponder frivolously this more raffish interpretation, but it is, to be sure, to brew an altogether different samovar and I felt constrained to drag my attention back from this rather sprightlier play to the one Turgenev had in mind. Here then is Dorothy Tutin, who plays Natalya, skipping neatly over the more obvious tripwires by declining to take any great advantage of the more comical *aspects of the woman's situation, but forfeit ing as well, it seemed to me, opportunities to lighten the gloom of a play that takes its spoilt and selfdramatising heroine all too seriously. It isn't easy to feel deeply for any Natalya. She is a bored and boring matron who doesn't care greatly for her husband, an easy going rural landowner who keeps her in leisured elegance, and she maintains a teasing hold on the affections of his effete friend, Raki tin, who plainly hopes that his devoted admiration might one day be rewarded more spectacularly than by platonic companionship. Her sudden passion for the tutor is en tirely sexual, and although it is undoubtedly giving her a bad time, the suggestion in her conversation and demeanour that she is in the grip of some hopeless romantic transport of the soul tends to be more than a little tiresome.
In case all this should lead you to think that the work is wholly taken up with the untidy state of Natalya
Petrovna's emotions, such as they are, I should supply the information to the unscholarly that a dozen other people are around the premises from time to time, with varying degrees of relevance. Some, indeed, are frankly in the nature of digressions, and there is very little. sense of an integrated' household, let alone a cohesive play. This, and the fact that the action tends to be broken up into a series of duologues, poses severe problems to the director, Toby Richardson, especially on Chichester's open stage, which isn't ideally constructed to cope with the incessant comings and goings. However, after occasioning me some mild dismay in the opening moments— when the first set of characters troop on to music and take up their positions in elaborate silence, as though we are in for "an Evening with Marcel Marceau and his Friends:" — the problems are solved with admirable flueney.
Among the players assembled in support of Miss Tutin are Derek Jacobi as the languorously longsuffering Rakitin; Nicholas Gray as the tutor; John Turner as Natalya's husband; Kay Barlow as her seventeen-year-old ward who is also in thrall to the tutor; Willoughby Goddard as a corpulent neighbour who cherishes hopes of marriage to this young woman and who is na-. turally encouraged in his suit by Natalya; and Timothy West as one of those medical men who are invariably in almost constant attendance at country mansions in nineteenth-century Russian plays. West is entrusted with, and delivers with forthright relish, many grave and disenchanted remarks which may not have entirely reflected Turgenev's view of the household, but which certainly went some little way towards reflecting mine.
Previous page
