She pouts, she flirts, she lies, she falls in love, she bewitches the men who come near her and deceives herself just as much as her victims. Amanda Drew's scintillating portrayal of Turgenev's selfish and dangerous Natalya is a joy to watch. I have seen Drew before in a wide variety of roles, and I can never understand why her career hasn't landed her a shelf full of acting awards. She's right at the top of my personal list of must-see performers on the London stage, and in this role she is quite electrifying. Touch her at your peril.
Patrick Marber's highly intelligent direction of his own adaptation of A Month In The Country makes use of the Lyttelton's vast stage to suggest a frozen desert or a sandy square bullring that keeps the characters at a safe distance. When they do come close together, the electricity generated blows a fuse. This is particularly true of Natalya, a part I last saw played by Helen Mirren in the West End in the early 1990s. There are not many actresses who can compete with the great Dame Helen, but Amanda Drew is one of them. Her Natalya is fatally self-absorbed and oblivious to the effects her behaviour has on others. Drew manages the difficult trick of showing her awfulness but also making her almost sympathetic.
There is strong support from Mark Gatiss as Shpigelsky, the local doctor, and John Simm as Rakitin, the family friend who has loved Natalya for twenty years. Newcomer Royce Pierreson, a handsome Pushkin lookalike, plays the young tutor Belyayev who is the victim of Natalya's latest crush. He lacks some of the expressiveness of the more experienced actors he shares the stage with, but it hardly matters. Lily Sacofsky, another relative newcomer, makes more of an impact as Vera, Natalya's 17-year-old ward, who has also fallen for the good-looking tutor.
Turgenev's play is a character comedy which looks forward to Chekhov, who wrote his plays half a century later against a background of social change and turmoil. Marber has brought Turgenev's finely drawn characters to life brilliantly while speeding up the action. The costumes and furniture are authentically mid 19th century, but what I call the samovar count is zero in Mark Thompson's abstract design, which uses clear perspex sheets and a red metal door which dominates the stage. The actors, when not involved in the action, remain seated around the back and sides of the stage, which also takes the play a step or two away from Chekhovian naturalism. Does it work? I think so. The one thing I didn't enjoy was the decision to have two of the characters singing short songs in very bad Russian. It doesn't come off, but the rest of the production is a sparkling success.
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