by Brian Friel after Ivan Turgenev
seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 26 September 2026
Lyndsey Turner directs Sophie Okonedo as Natalya Petrovna, Alistair Petrie as Michael Rakitin, Patrick Gibson as Aleksay Belyayev and a supporting cast of nine in Brian Friel's modernising adaptation of Ivan Turgenev's play A Month in the Country (written in the late 1840s).
The month is principally the young Aleksey's time on the Islayev estate, where both Natalya, the wife of Arkady Islayev, and her young ward Vera are attracted to him; in the meantime their neighbour Michael has been holding a candle for Natalya (apparently both recognised and held in check) for years. The disruptive influence of an attractive young stranger does not exactly resolve the deceptions and confusions of the group of characters who have been rubbing along "in the country" for some time, but it does serve to crystallise the pervading sense of stifling uncertainty on the estate.
Clearly we can now see this play as a fore-runner of Chekhov's work, though Turgenev did not rate himself as much of a dramatist. The country-house setting is an ideal one for examining the lives of leisured people who seem to have little better to do than to be unhappy in various ways, and nothing much seems to have changed in the decades between the two writers' works. Indeed, as Summerfolk (recently seen at the National Theatre) shows, Gorky could still make use of the setting some years after Chekhov's death, bringing his own distinctive attention to familiar situations.
Brian Friel's adaptation serves the play well, streamlining the text and creating an easy colloquial idiom. The cast is excellent, Sophie Okonedo bringing an exquisite nuance to the role of Natalya, Alistair Petrie an increasingly poignant hopelessness to his unrequited passion, and Patrick Gibson using his Irish brogue to accentuate the gaucheness of the awestruck impoverished but educated young man employed as a tutor to the young son of the estate, soon rapidly out of his depth in the febrile atmosphere. Though Natalya's passion for the young man creates several crises, the stoic acceptance of the imperfection of marriage voiced by her mother-in-law and perhaps endorsed by her husband provide a measured balance to the melodrama that threatens to engulf the household.
The scenes of the play move from room to room and even outside the country house; on the exposed Donmar stage the set changes are neatly managed by having the entire stage concealed in a glass box of shrubbery which ascends and descends as required (designed by Leslie Travers).
It is interesting to note that Patrick Marber's adaptation of the play, titled Three Days in the Country, chose quite different aspects of the original text, to judge from the comments I made on seeing it in 2015 - not least in its closing moments which featured a card lesson given by the German tutor to the young Kolya: in Friel's play, the German is present as a house guest and prospective tutor, but Kolya is only talked about and never seen.
