Fathers and Sons, 11.7.14

 

Arkady and Bazarov, the two students who return home
in Friel's warmly humane 'Fathers and Sons'

Brian Friel’s deft 1987 stage adaptation of Turgenev’s landmark 1862 novel (set just after the Emancipation of the Serfs) was directed at the Donmar by Lyndsey Turner (ex of “Chimerica”).  Rob Howell designed a beautifully organic matrixed wooden set redolent of Russian birch forests. It was encouraging to see how many Russians were in the audience for this, one of their national masterpieces. 

L: Joshua James as Arkady
R:  Seth Numrich as Bazarov

The plot was simplicity itself:  two Petersburg students imbued with a fashionable commitment to radical change return home only to find that family, love, disease and the harvest all conspire to obstruct the dawn of a ‘new Russia’. 

Twinkly-eyed newcomer Joshua James (~22yo), a gawky jug-eared youth at first clearly in his comrade’s shadow, was impressively supple at conveying the underlying decency of Arkady, the less dogmatic of the two students, from a traditional land-owning family.   

Revolution is no laughing matter: 
Seth Numrich's Bazarov

US import Seth Numrich (27) had the harder role of making one warm to the less appealing Bazarov, a doctrinaire nihilist who’s beastly to the humble parents who are so devoted they celebrate his homecoming with a ‘Te Deum’.  Bazarov’s facile rejection of emotional ties for political reasons is compromised when he falls head-over-heels for glacial wealthy widow Anna Odintsova (played by Irish beauty Elaine Cassidy). 

Karl Johnson, one of the proud fathers

Karl Johnson made a strong impression as Vassily, Bazarov’s bumbling country doctor father, a man incapable of finishing a sentence without a trio of Latin tags.  As so often with the Donmar, a large cast (thirteen in all) gave an object lesson in ensemble-playing.  Stand-outs amongst the smaller roles included Siobhan McSweeney’s lovesick maid Dunyasha, Anthony Calf’s distrait Nikolai (Arkady’s father, a well-intentioned but inept landowner with a younger wife he’s raised a social peg or two) and Susan Engel’s batty Princess Olga (who grasps for the blunderbuss at the merest whiff of cat or accordion player).    


Tim McMullan's magnificently
disappointed Uncle Pavel

Tim McMullan’s Uncle Pavel, a fastidiously world-weary Europhile dandy whose world-view is most directly-challenged by Bazarov’s brash nihilism, was the play’s emotional pivot.  Billington put his finger on it beautifully by calling McMullan’s Pavel “one of the best displays I’ve ever seen of the superfluous man” (a type Motley has no difficulty empathising with).

Ivan Turgenev (1818-83): 
prophet of a lost Russian liberalism

A typhus epidemic brings matters to a suitably tragic ending, but it would be wrong to classify ‘Fathers & Sons’ as a tragedy.  Its emotional core, which rang so true, lay in its affectionate depiction of how families (doting fathers, idealistic sons, disappointed uncles, anxious second wives, mad aunts, brisk sisters and truculent servants) function as a microcosm of the almost Burkean “wider ties that bind”, which no one political philosophy can truly encompass.  It was Russia’s tragedy that a subsequent generation of idealistic students rejected Turgenev’s humane liberal vision.