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.