“Hearts are trumpery?” inquires the German tutor Herr Schaff at the beginning of this delicately amusing and forlorn exploration of love. Of course, Schaff, considering a hand of cards, doesn’t quite know what he’s saying. For him the Russian language is an elusive and slippery character – beautifully performed, in Brian Friel’s 1992 version of Turgenev’s play, by English.
Similarly, it’s not clear whether any of the 12 figures in the grand Islayev estate are in absolute control of their speech. Did Derbhle Crotty’s demure and trapped Natalya just refer to her sluice-mending husband (Peter Hanly) as “the dam enthusiast”, or did we mishear? Either way, Friel essentially turns A Month in The Country into a word play.
Suggestion and double meanings are the lingua franca of 19th-century Russian theatre, where the flow of passion is halted by the sluicegate of gentility.
Turgenev minted the form, Chekhov refined and enhanced it, and Friel scored it for Irish voices. As the play constructs a tangled net of desire and romance, Jason Byrne’s elegant production defers to the authority of the text. The director’s usually experimental vision instead maintains an uncluttered view of that age-old, simple plot structure – the “love dodecahedron”.
Natalya, the object of Michel’s unrequited desire (Declan Conlon, smouldering), longs for her son’s young tutor Aleksey (Laurence Kinlan, raffish), who, in turn, is the unrequited beloved of Natalya’s daughter Vera (Elaine Symons, girlish). Vera, however, is sought after by uncultured farmer Bolshintsov (Pat Laffan, nicely oafish), a match negotiated by the ingratiating schemer, Ignaty (Don Wycherley, utterly fantastic), who has his none-too-romantic eyes set on spinster Lizaveta (Fiona Bell, understated).
Such dynamics demand accomplished ensemble playing (and Byrne’s cast is a glorious assembly), but the play is actually measured out in an increasingly brisk series of duologues, quickly reaching the speed and pitch of melodrama.
Love here is a form of madness, “a catastrophe” that makes “the unreasonable perfectly reasonable”. Crotty’s Natalya, who is worst afflicted, best expresses this in the rictus smile that masks her slow heartbreak, while the airless symmetry and oppressive scale of Joe Vanek’s minimal set (even the gauze around his gazebo feels suffocating) is psychologically attuned to her. But if the final acts seem to whisk this production closer to farce (no romantic clinch goes without its “accidental” witness), the play’s comedy may achieve a keener insight.
Wycherley, wonderfully alive to the defensiveness of his cheesy jokes, is ultimately more sympathetic, more moving in his candour than the overblown declarations of impassioned leads. And Andrew Bennett’s gleeful word trumpery, routinely confusing “lust” with “love”, seems to recognise beneath the babbling flow of this summer drama a more revealing torrent of desire. Schaff, as the song almost put it, you’re dam right.
Peter Crawley
Friday, May 26, 2006