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.
