Anna Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy adapted by Phillip Breen

seen at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 21 June 2025

Phillip Breen, who has adapted Tolstoy's novel for the stage, directs Natalie Dormer as Anna, Tomiwa Edun as her husband Karenin, Jonnie Broadbent as her brother Stiva, Naomi Sheldon as his wife Dolly, Shalisha James-Davis as Dolly's sister Kitty, David Oakes as Levin (eventually Kitty's husband) and Seamus Dilate as Vronsky, with whom Anna has a passionate affair in this staging of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina.

All those relationships, together with Russian patronymics and nicknames, famously cause complications for non-Russian readers, but are perhaps easier to keep in mind when embodied by actors on the stage (who dispense with the patronymics almost entirely); there are a number of minor characters as well. The novel examines three fraught marriages, the trajectories of which are interleaved; the play remains surprisingly faithful to this structure rather than taking the easier but less satisfactory option of focussing attention only on Anna. This does make for an intense experience which runs the risk of being too long-winded, but it also allows for the famous opening sentence of the novel - "All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion" (in the 1954 translation by Rosemary Edmonds) - to be fully demonstrated.

The Oblonsky marriage is under constant strain because of Stiva's serial infidelities and Dolly's exhaustion from child-bearing; the Karenin marriage is stretched to breaking point by Anna's grand passion for Vronsky and her husband's intransigence; in contrast, the Levin marriage, delayed by misunderstandings and almost sabotaged by Levin's tactless revelations about his past, seems set to be solid even though it will be always be volatile as husband and wife strive to accommodate and understand one another.

This was a fine cast and a well-designed production with a versatile set (designer Max Jones), but it did not always convince. The main problem, perhaps inherited from the book itself, is that Vronsky does not come across as the heart-breaker he needs to be: there was insufficient emphasis on Kitty's crush on him, or on his caddishness at abandoning her, so that the impact of Anna's presence at the ball where the family expected him to propose to Kitty was not as traumatic as it should have been. Then, in turn, there was no real spark between Anna and Vronsky to justify the grand passion, though the later stages of their affair, when the social pressured crowding them in upon themselves laid bare the paucity of their inner resources, was very well handled.

In a fluid staging which included simulated train journeys and a finely imagined journey by carriage during which Dolly vented her frustrations while an impassive coachman concentrated on driving, and mercifully refrained from offering any peasant wisdom at the end, Anna's final desperate act was somehow not made fully clear. I knew what she had done, because I have read the book and seen other adaptations, but I wonder whether someone completely new to the story would have been certain about what was shown. These two events perhaps indicate the weakness of an otherwise successful adaptation: Dolly's outburst just too modern, consisting almost entirely of expletives, and Anna's demise the victim of too-clever stagecraft.

1536

by Ava Pickett

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 4 June 2025

With characters named Anna and Jane, and with the year of Ann Boleyn's downfall and execution as its title, one might have expected Ava Pickett's play 1536 (here expertly directed by Lyndsey Turner) to be yet another work appealing to our apparently inexhaustible fascination with Tudor history. But Anna (Siena Kelly) and Jane (Liv Hill) and their friend Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) are young women in a village in Essex, a place which considers Colchester, let alone London, to be too far away to provide anything except distant and late-arriving news. What they hear about the disgraced queen profoundly disturbs them, but they are at the same time aware that more may well have happened in the time it has taken for the news to reach them; that what sounds like an impossible rift in the right way of the world may well have already been resolved.

In the meantime Anna pursues her wanton ways, for the most part blithely unaware that her reputation is being tarnished, while Jane prepares to follow her father's bidding into an arranged marriage with Richard (Adam Hugill) - the man currently infatuated with Anna. Mariella, slowly assuaging her own heartbreak over William (Angus Cooper) who has also married for social advantage in the village, is apprenticed to the midwife and hopes her work will see her through, even though she does not like it.

The menfolk are occasional presences in what is a tense but cunningly localised drama of conflicting desires and social oppression. Anna appears to be in control of her life, and she often treats the bland and none-too-bright Jane with amused contempt even though they are supposed to be firm friends. Jane herself, seeking utterly naive at first, shows an unpleasantly ruthless streak under pressure, as the mild-mannered so often do. Mariella is less amenable to this treatment and more aware of the danger Anna is courting; their personalities and attitudes make for a powerful microcosm of late medieval society as it impinged on womenfolk, while the news of the catastrophe enveloping Queen Ann acts as a counterpoint to the development of these women's "small" and (of course) undocumented lives.

The action takes place in the fields outside the village. The set, designed by Max Jones, is a field of wild grasses, very suitable for the illicit assignations Anna so enjoys, and for conducting female gossip away from the unwelcome attentions of fathers and husbands (until the men come looking for the women). Since the Almeida has no proscenium, the set is visible from the moment one enters the auditorium, and it is framed at the front by a huge rectangle of thin neon light, almost like the border of a giant cinema screen. The wildness of the Essex countryside immediately destroys any expectation that this is going to be a play about court life, and the modern earthiness of the language only reinforces the point that we are dealing with articulate but essentially unlettered folk. But, as news percolates that the queen has been executed, local events put the three friends in danger: their prospects for surviving in a relentlessly patriarchal world are completely uncertain. The resonances with the modern world are all too clear: who will be believed? Is it safer to strike out or to bow to one's fate?