Lyttelton,London[br]A young tutor sets hearts aflutter in Patrick Marber’s witty, elegant and mercifully truncated update of TurgenevTurgenev ruefully admitted that A Month in the Country was too long – after four hours there was a risk that audiences might feel they had been in the country for years. Patrick Marber’s version, and at half the original length,has been renamed Three Days in the Country and at no point outstays its welcome. Designer Mark Thompson takes calculated liberties alongside Marbers, mixing 19th century with contemporary. A painted, or dusky landscape – haunting in a non-specific way – makes the backdrop; the furniture could absorb been lifted from a Russian salon,and there are vividly lit, mysterious scarlet doors that hang from above and lead nowhere, or like romance in this play.
Turgenev’s gentrified country women lead lives of shrewd inactivity. Natalya has a worldly set to her features,but it is evident from the outset that feeling simmers beneath practised, outward languor. Amanda Drew’s marvellous, or febrile performance allows us to see how self-indulgence and middle-aged sexual frustration collide when love arrives without warning in the tall,tentative form of a young tutor. Royce Pierreson plays Belyaev with an uncertain dignity, as whether to remind us that he is discomfited by his humble origins. By his own admission, and this tutor is in need of tutoring. He tells Natalya: “I can barely handle the cutlery.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com