Kreutzer vs Kreutzer

by Laura Wade

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 12 July 2015

This new 'play for voices' features Katherine Parkinson as 'Woman' and Samuel West as 'Man', with Thomas Gould (violin) and Ana-Maria Vera (piano) playing Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9 (the 'Kreutzer' ), and Thomas Gould (first violin), Jamie Campbell (second violin), Max Baillie (viola) and Minat Lyons (cello) playing Janáček's String Quartet No. 1 (the 'Keutzer Sonata'). It is directed by Tamara Harvey.

Laura Wade has had the brilliant idea of linking three famous works - the two musical pieces mentioned above and Tolstoy's story 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - in a meditation on the fraught relationships between men and women. Tolstoy's story is related by a man who has killed his wife from jealousy when she has begun an affair with a musician friend of his while they were practising Beethoven's sonata together. Janáček's quartet, in turn, is a response to Tolstoy's story, inflected by his own unconsummated passion for a young married woman (Kamila Stösslová) to whom he wrote more than 700 letters towards the end of his life.

The play opens with the Woman and the Man encountering each other for the first time in the terms laid out by Tolstoy's story - the musician arriving at the house at the request of his friend, to play music with the wife, who claims not to be proficient, but who suggests they play Beethoven's 'Kreutzer' sonata together. This is a difficult, rich and passionate work - the musician is amazed at the suggestion, then delighted to find that the wife can hold her own in the piano part. After the first movement has been played, the pair flirt and spar with each other ; after the second movement, there is a scene some time later when they have begun an affair. The third movement begins just as the husband confronts them.

Katherine Parkinson and Samuel West are wonderful at conveying the progress of this affair - the initial awkwardness and social politeness gliding into banter, and then a delightful post-coital scene in which the man's amour propre is punctured by the woman's assertive pleasure in her own sensuality. There is a deliberate and pointed modern gloss on the woman's frankness which cleverly undercuts the implicit misogyny of Tolstoy's story, made all the more effective by having no actor to represent the husband.  

In the second half, the scene begins again almost identically, only this time the dialogues are intercut with the movements of the Janáček quartet. After the first movement, the situation diverges with the woman firmly rejecting the declaration of the musician's feelings, though regretting that her sense of propriety forces her to lose the musician as a friend. He persuades her to continue with the planned concert performance for which they are practising, as to call it off would only confirm the husband's suspicions, and she agrees. Between the second and third movements there is a scene in which the tension between the man and the woman renders both small talk and effusive compliments equally fraught with awkward double meanings. Between the third and fourth movements the musician visits the house to upbraid the wife for not answering his letters. She is disparagingly matter-of-fact about this, pointing out firstly that no-one replies to thank you letters (which is what his first was), and secondly that if he wants to record all his impressions, he should keep a diary like other people. At this point the husband returns and can only draw the same conclusion as before - even though the situation is completely different.

This was a delightful evening in which the richness of the music was enhanced by the domestic dramas enfolding it, while the intensity of the emotions of the Woman and the Man was given emphasis by the excellent musical performances. The two actors merely circled round the instruments on the small stage, or, in the fatal bedroom scene of the first half, the Man simply stood on a chair immobilised, to signify that he was languishing in bed but suddenly appalled by the realisation that the Woman was not as 'pure' as he had imagined - a terrific skewering of the double standards of the nineteenth century (and of the twentieth, and doubtless the twenty-first as well). This imaginative solution to blending the dialogues with the musical performances was entirely successful.

It is a pity that there are only two performances.