by
Ivan Howlett
Plays and Players
Uniquely this year’s program has a full-page advert for the Artistic
Director’s latest recordings. A
pity, perhaps, that Sir John Clements never told us of his latest chart-busters
in that way. However, Keith Michell,
the new man writes of his choice of the plays for the 1974 season. Of the fourth he says: A
Month in the Country, a beautiful comedy of midsummer madness, has an
eminently suitable title for Oaklands Park.
Before the season opened one’s instinct was that with Dorothy Tutin
leading the cast and Toby Robertson as Mr. Michell’s chosen director, this
would be the high spot of the season. In
the event it was its sole saving grace. Not
merely because the other three productions were so disappointing, but because it
provided genuine theatre by any standards.
From an aristocratic background, Ivan Turgenev was used to summering in
the country, either on the family estate or in the years preceding 1850 at the
Chateau de Courtavenel, the French country home of the actress-singer Madame
Pauline Viardot whom he loved, hopelessly, until he died.
At Courtavenel, Turgenev occupied an uneasy position, neither exactly
guest nor retainer.
His play has its life in a similar sort of limbo, a situation seemingly
trivial but in fact criss-crossed with the inevitably frustrated emotional wires
that vibrate in such apparent emptiness. The
characters flirt with reality only to find themselves ill-equipped for the
consequences. Mr. Robertson pits the stifling, enclosing forces—the
family, habit, marriage roles, the aging process, the erosion of freshness in
relationships—strongly against the pressures which try vainly to break
out—the individual egos, the need for new experience.
And Miss Tutin’s shifting, restless reading of the central character,
Natalya, makes the struggle red-blooded. The
developing emotions are charted with a satisfying accuracy through Turgenev’s
mounting climaxes, progressing as they do through a series of duologues.
And we are presented with a teasingly ironic commentary on the absurdity
of all human passions. In that
sense the play is Chekhovian, and this is the mood Mr. Robertson captures.
Natalya is the wife of a wealthy, but plain-minded working landowner,
Islayev (John Turner), whom—she thinks anyway—she no longer loves.
She herself is loved by the resident family friend Rakitin (Derek
Jacobi), who no longer holds any interest for her.
Their amorous fencings have been whittled away over four years to mere
empty rehearsings—‘lace-weaving’ she calls it. Flightily, temperamentally
and spitefully she swings away from him and looks, impetuously, but never with
great conviction towards Belayev, (Nicholas Clay), the young tutor to her
children. Then the practicalities
emerge. The natural partner for
Belayev would seem to be her teenage ward, Verochka, who has already fallen for
him. Once embarked on her search
for a new involvement, Natalya has to descend into uncharacteristic
heartlessness. Deviously she
attempts to quell her own jealousy by agreeing to marry off Verochka to a man
who is no more than a fat old fool—and this with a show of sisterly affection
as she makes the offer Verochka.
In her scenes with Belayev, Natalya is haughty, faltering, uselessly
passionate, matter-of-fact, and apologetic in turns—sometimes the mercurial
Miss Tutin seems to be all these things in the course of a sentence.
Her feelings for him are impossible to communicate fully, and in the
unlikely event of Belayev ever presuming to return her love, their relationship
would become as stultified as her previous affair with Rakitin. Sadly, then, and pathetically, Natalya’s passion is
hopeless, still-born. For Rakitin,
the man displaced, the only option is to retreat with minimum loss of dignity.
Derek Jacobi gives Miss Tutin precisely the room and emotional space she
requires. His is an exquisitely
poised performance, which never overshadows, and never becomes over-bearing.
Where lesser actors would have mishandled the situation, and thus
possibly destroyed the balance of the play, Mr. Jacobi works through Rakitin’s
mental anguish gradually, and quietly introduces the character’s brave
decision to leave the household—which he does as the events come to their
inevitably negative conclusion.
The third principal figure and the raucous fool at the feast is Timothy
West’s splendidly played doctor, Schpigelsky, malicious, cynical,
self-centered, a scornful bidder at the cattle-market of human relationships, an
essential feature of Turgenev’s overall view, sure-footed crushing through the
romantic imaginings of Natalya’s heart.
What makes Mr. Robertson’s production so superior to Chichester’s
previous offerings this year is that it is acted from the inside and as a whole.
Its balance, shape and strength come from a cast that are together and
working off each other to the extent that there can be dramatic truth. And if there’s one thing that the Chichester stage unmasks,
it is phoniness—the redundance of the non-essential.
Tonight We Improvise and
Oedipus Tyrannus both fell for the
mistake of playing with the theatre’s apparent capacity for novelty.
The instrument was used to air its stops rather than for purpose of
making music. The
Confederacy failed too because a style was presented rather than a play.
It was an amalgam of what is commonly recognized as Restoration comedy
acting, where a straight and unified reading of a pungent piece of theater
should have been the aim.
But this is no time to censure the overall efforts of an Artistic
Director new to a theatre the precise strengths of which are difficult to
analyze. The interest will be in the adjustments he sees fit to make for next
year’s productions, particularly in his choice of play and directors.