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. 

Fortune's Fool, 6.12.13

Rare revival of Turgenev's nineteenth-century social satire at the Old Vic.

Written when he was thirty in 1848, at the height of Tsar Nicholas I's autocracy, "Fortune's Fool" (or "The Hanger-On") predates each of "A Month in the Country" (his best-known play), "Fathers and Sons" (his best-known novel) and his internal exile and subsequent emigration to Western Europe.  Its satire of provincial Russian society led to its banning by the censor.  It wasn't until the new reign of Alexander II ('the Liberator') that it was finally published in 1857, four years before the Emancipation of the Serfs. 



Ivan Turgenev (1818-83)

An enthusiast for both Emancipation and for Gogol, Turgenev was less prolific than his contemporary Ostrovsky, scripting nine plays against Ostrovsky’s forty-seven. Better known as a novelist and short-story writer (all the great Nineteenth Century Russians were masters of multiple forms), Turgenev had strained links with Dostoyevsky (three years younger) and Tolstoy (ten years younger).  They caricatured him, unfairly, as only affecting to challenge Tsarist autocracy in order to curry favour with the young.  Whilst the direct political satire in “Fortune’s Fool” is necessarily muted, its social satire is savage, and savagely funny at that. 

First produced in this Mike Poulton version at Chichester in 1996, ‘”Fortune’s Fool” bypassed the West End by going direct to Broadway in 2002, where it garnered Tonies for Alan Bates and Frank Langella.  Consequently, this production at the Old Vic marks the play’s first ever West End appearance.  Director Lucy Bailey (former artistic director at the Print Room) plays it in broadly authentic period style, with a design by William Dudley which ingeniously bisected the stage with multiple door frames. 


Lucy Briggs-Owen, the heiress of'Fortune's Fool'

Young nobles Olga and Yeletsky (tautly played by Lucy Briggs-Owen and Alexander Vlahos) return to their country estate from Petersburg after their marriage.  Estate manager Trembinsky (Daniel Cerqueira), full of empty bluster, doesn’t know how many serfs they own and is constantly under-cut by the pertly capable footman Pyotr (Dyfan Dwyfor).  Plus there’s a sitting tenant in the laundry cupboard, and he's been there thirty years!  And as this squatter, one Kuzovkin, though penniless, is nominally a 'gentleman', he needs must be tolerated at the dinner table.

Richard McCabe (Tropatchov, the pushy neighbour)
and Iain Glen (Kuzovkin, the hanger-on),
co-stars of Fortune's Fool

Worse than the staff and hangers-on are the neighbours. Flamboyant Tropatchov, the sort of egocentric who’ll snatch a mile before the proverbial inch is even offered, attaches himself to the young couple.  A full-figured Regency dandy and “an infamous, fatuous windbag”, Tropatchov loses no opportunity to lord it over Kuzovkin.  A welcome-home supper for the newly-weds goes disastrously wrong when Tropatchov plies the vulnerable Kuzovkin with drink, and unexpected revelations ensue.



Richard McCabe as Wilson in this
summer's West End 'royal' hit 'The Audience'
(the Helen Mirren HMQ play)

Richard McCabe, fresh from his Olivier-winning role as Wilson in “The Audience”, memorably played Tropatchov for laughs.  Iain Glen (ex of 'Game of Thrones') also excelled in the harder task of generating sympathy for the put-upon Kuzovkin.  Remote though Tsarist Russia may be to contemporary London, McCabe and Glen smoothly steered the audience through any temporal and spatial barriers, generating a strong first-night response.  Although we're still waiting for press night, Motley had the distinct sense the Old Vic has a sure-fit hit on its hands.  Recommended!