Brighton Year-Round 2024

Helen Edmundson (adaptor) Anna Karenina

Wick Theatre Company

Genre: Adaptation, classical, Drama, Fringe Theatre, International, Theatre, Tragedy, Translation

Venue: The Barn, Southwick

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

As many embark on a feelgood Christmas show, one company puts on one which certainly blows a few flakes of snow. But there’s a difference. Helen Edmundson’s 1992 adaptation of Tolstoy’s 1877 novel Anna Karenina directed by Diane Robinson is mounted by the Wick Theatre Company at their home theatre, The Barn, Southwick, till December 14^th.

Edmundson’s taken the novel by its spine or scruff and shaken it up to reveal Tolstoy depicts two figures of equal importance; one overshadowed in every adaptation till now. The eponymous Anna Karenina (Amelia Leigh), and landowner Constantine Levin (Dan Dryer) who searches for meaning and love: a self-portrait. Uniquely, since they don’t meet, Edmundson conjures conversations between them, across the divide: like an epistolary novel come to life Levin, or Kostya, urges caution and Anna reassures, explains, excuses. It’s as if they own a psychic link: the two most conscious individuals.

A 13-strong cast stalk Judith Berrill’s remarkable set of pillared recession using the deep stage to striking effect: red, gold, brown alternate with white inlaid Ionic pillars: crowned upstage by a classical frontage like the interior of a grand house or even church. There’s an oval in blue-grey behind which figures duck to become immediately frozen in time as gauze-screened cameos: the work of Berrill, choreographed by Robinson, with props by Martin Oakley and Ali Hastilow.

Lindsay Midalis’ and Maggi Pierce’s costumes are even more striking than the  rapid costume-changes. Particularly with Anna but also other characters like Kitty and miraculously Seriozha, Anna’s child. This is Esther Draycott who has to morph into a child with Chris Horlock’s wigs and make-up. Liz Ryder-Weldon’s music direction too adds a subtle dimension: cleverly she eschews obvious choices and lends unobtrusive heft.

It’s all intensely formalised, blustered off in a minute by dry ice to a smoky railway station ominously lit by Stat Mastoris to scoop out cavernous effects. Inevitably, such a work, even with Edmundson’s airborne brilliance, hangs heavily on some; though there’s remarkably little acting to a generic gloom.

Things are stacked against Anna even as she alights there: gender, a loveless marriage to a man 20 years her senior. It’s only a matter of time and scythes.

Indeed the cowled figure of Death (Jas Crawford, also choreographer and assistant director) swirls round the cast, offering to touch, even dance – Crawford has crafted some sweeping ensemble dances too, with sudden pauses. Most spectacular is the ensemble crowding a horse race.  Here in Edmundson’s depiction Death’s a palpable dancing figure, sashaying between the living. Indeed like the seductive Death figure emerging in Lampadusa’s The Leopard: except here she’s ubiquitous.

First the Railway Widow – later Levin’s housekeeper Agatha –  Zoe Edden, emerges bewailing the death of her husband, cut in half by a train as he worked. Enter Count Vronsky (Dan Lovett) who gives the woman 200 roubles, and Anna’s intrigued. Soon husband Karenin (Dave Peaty) is aroused to jealousy.

Leigh is sovereign throughout: glamorous and poised, she moves seamlessly, talks with truth and intensity and slides seamlessly into intensity, passion, abandon stylised in Crawford’s choreography, and the terrors of childbirth. Even more important is Leigh’s capacity to develop the wild arc of Anna’s ride and fall. Thus from the socially confident, radiant Anna to a woman shrunken into morphine addiction, abandonment of a very different kind and shrivelling up to tragedy, Leigh’s physical realisation makes sense of Anna’s switchback feelings and her choices receding as everyone slowly shuns her.

Lovett is commanding and quite regal. A difficult part to cast, Lovett finds Vronsky’s career soldier and  conveys his unease when temporarily relinquishing that role. More colonel than lieutenant, which is what he is, Lovett uncannily suggests from the beginning how this might end; and works well too with Crawford’s mirror chorography with Anna, when the soldier turns lover: his speeches too turn from rapture to offhand.

Peaty’s Karenin is every inch the committee man, delighting in small planning victories, themselves not contemptible in a Russia rapidly modernising: equally something less and less interesting to Anna. His schoolmasterly stiffness with Anna is painfully truthful; his hardening and melting skilfully done.

Anna from the start of this story (it’s set 1867-72) is almost compromised by Stiva, her profligate brother. Rich Jayston’s fresh roué reveals shallows of raffish charm: a blaze of youthful appeal. He’s later slightly incongruously Levin’s older brother Nikolai. But Stiva’s been unfaithful to Dolly, Stiva’s wife and Kitty’s elder sister (Izzy Boreham, painfully honest and torn) who also respects and loves Anna. Anna’s mission is tricky: forgive and build. But what happens when she too proves unfaithful? Not for Stiva’s interminable promiscuity, but an all-consuming passion? Will people notice any difference? Boreham telegraphs in fractured but subdued rage the feeling of a woman doubly betrayed.

Dolly’s sister is the tenuous link to Levin. Dryer’s Levin is a man both convincingly frustrated and with both feet planted on the ground. He exudes both rustic disdain (an aristocrat done up in dun colours, more costume triumph) but who in true Tolstoyan mode is looking at the stars. Dryer’s voice exhales painful doubt, awkwardness indeed shyness mixed with underlying pride: a refusal to accept his life is less meaningful than the glitter he disdains. There’s comedy too, trying to work amongst peasants, finding they can’t live up to his ideals of post-serfdom (only abolished in 1861). He can’t find faith either, needs to fix on a purpose; and the woman who alone gives meaning: Kitty.

Draycott’s Kitty is an exquisite shaping of warmth yet refusal of Levin’s overtures is maanged with an emotional tact that eventually blossoms as she acknowledges her feelings. Quite opposite is her boy’s-capped hunch of a role as Anna’s son Seriozha, flinching from Karenin, running to Anna and burying head-in-lap. It’s notable physical acting and Draycott is one of the show’s triumphs.

Clare Wiggins’ Princess Betsy modulates darkly as Anna’s fairweather friend, a microcosm of sympathetic conformity cooling to ostracism.  There’s keen observation too from Rosy Armitage’s Countess Vronsky, costumier Maggi Pierce’s watchful Governess, and the fine vocal admonitions of the Priest (Derek Fraser).

The counterpoint of Anna and Levin becomes both more frantic and more elegiac as the spiritually linked paid touch hands in some other sphere, yet sees one of them spiral away.

The novel’s symmetry is brought out: but so too is its dramatic amplitude. Here in Edmundson’s adaptation we finally get a sense of how, in around two-and-a-half hours, a world emerges from what was a cameo-flat planisphere. And in Robinson’s team a vibrant retelling, superbly produced: with Leigh above all, Dryer, Draycott and others giving life to a piece tricky to realise.

Stage Manager Gaby Bowring, DSM Julian Batstone

Lighting Operator and technical Support Suse Crosby, Sound Design Bob Ryder, Sound Operation Jeff Woodword

Publicity and Programme Tamsin Mastoris, Strat Mastoris, Judith Berrill

Set Construction and Painting Noel Boswijk, Sue Chaplin, Dave Comber, Nigel Goldfinch, Ali Hastilow, Mike King, Sue Netley, Gary Walker, Judith Berrill

Props Lauren Brakes, Di Tidzer, Specialist Prop Design Martin Oakley, Ali Hastilow

Russian Adviser Dominic Fean, Photography Miles Davies, Front of House Emily Dennett and Team

Thanks to Men in Sheds, Lancing and Sompting, Harveys of Hove and Gladrags, New Venture Theatre

Published December 14, 2024December 14, 2024 by Simon Jenner