“Deep, dark, and sophisticated, this Anna Karenina is a feminist fable with real bite.” Lesley Hart and Polina Kalinina impress with a fresh take on Tolstoy’s classic.
📍 Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 13 May 2023 to 3 June 2023
🕖 Evenings, 7.30pm | Matinee, Sat 2.30pm
🕖 Running time: 75 minutes (without interval)
✏️ Writer: Lesley Hart after Leo Tolstoy
🎬 Director: Polina Kalinina
🛠️ Designer: Emma Bailey
💡 Lighting Designer: Mark Henderson
🔊 Sound Designer, Composer & Arranger: Xana
🕺 Movement Director: Vicki Manderson
🫂 Intimacy Director: Adelaide Waldrop
🎂 Parental Discretion
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets, Audio Induction Loop
🎭 BSL Interpreted: 31 May, 7:30pm; Captioned & Audio Described: 3 June, 2:30pm; Touch Tour at 1:15pm.
Tolstoy’s masterwork, Anna Karenina both invites, and defies adaptation. As audacious an attempt to study the human condition as any ever attempted, it’s nigh-900 page multi-strand thesis weaves together themes of love, faith, choice, fate, societal misogyny, power, and faith. The cast may be compact, but their lives are anything but. Undaunted, Lesley Hart and Polina Kalinina extract the titular heroine from the page, manifesting her on stage in a magnetic Lindsey Campbell.
Streamlined by necessity, this new fable from the Lyceum Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic may be billed as a study in passion, but is best understood as a fable illustrating the virtues of considered action, and the wages of rash decision-making.
This Anna’s marriage to Karenin (Stephen McCole) isn’t setting off any fireworks, but it’s not obviously miserable, and is brightened by young son Seryozha (Noah Osmani, Robbie Scott, Ayanda Vilakazi on rotation). This Vronsky (Robert Akodoto) is no prince charming, but a egocentric, priapic infant with the emotional sophistication of a hormonal toddler. Thus when she impulsively falls from society’s graces into his arms, there’s little to offset the loss of her son, friends, and, albeit limited, opportunities as a respected politician’s wife. Socially exiled her mind twists in upon itself, unable to reconcile her need for passionate love with a world set on punishing a woman’s bid for personal freedom.
In contrast, the life of Levin Kostya (Ray Sesay) takes another route, his love for Kitty (Tallulah Greive) denied at first, leading to a self-imposed agricultural retreat and deep introspection. When hope for that relationship is revived unexpectedly, he is no hostage to passion, and these lovers enter into a considered marriage of both body and mind.
The fork in their road is defined by one thing: thoughtful, heart-felt choice. Hart and Kalinina (this is very much a tandem enterprise), cleverly splice scenes together to expose these constrasting fates, intersecting lives, and interior thought.
When Anna’s brother, the sexually profligate Stiva (Angus Miller) opens the play faced with his loyal wife Dolly’s (Jamie Marie Leary) discovery of his flagrant infidelity, his thoughts are shared directly friend Levin. He’s talking with his pal after the fallout, but in layering that conversation upon the earlier argument, his self-serving and juvenile mind is laid bare. It’s a device which could get old, quickly, but in truth is deployed strategically and concisely at critical moments.
Much of the first act enjoys the tight choreography of an Adam Ant music video, thanks to Vicki Manderson’s sharp choreography, and Xana’s post-modern, dramatic, and rhythmic soundscape. Everything from extravagant balls to stylised sex scenes are rendered with abstract edges, and focussed intensity. Where designer Emma Bailey keeps the costuming lavish and suitably period, the set is framed in steel columns whilst an ominous gold, spiky spine folded in ribbon hangs above. The rear wall slides back when required, revealing a glass-fronted cinematic space in which to set tableaus from snowbound railway stations to fields of golden wheat.
The second act eschews much of the stylised proceedings of the first as the players are increasingly saddled with the consequences of their choices, good or ill. Without the big ticket drama, there’s more space here to expand the characters, and to explore the story with more nuance. There’s still that sophisticated layering of time and drama, however, most successfully when Levin and Kitty’s heartfelt and open argument is twinned with Anna and Vronsky’s breakdown in communications.
©️ Robbie McFadzean
Not all the play’s devices are so successful, and the abstract horse-race towards the close of Act 1 strays too far into the absurd to retain enough dramatic weight. A chipper, and charming Greive is a game Frou-Frou the horse, but there’s just too much comedy to detract from a seminal scene intended to expose Vronsky’s terrible shortcomings as a human being. Indeed the audience most probably comes away from it viewing Vronsky as a compassionate and skilled horseman, rather than the irresponsible architect of the beast’s demise.
Within the confines the play sets for itself, however, it is very successful, particularly in highlighting the misogynistic double-standard whereby Anna is rendered persona non-grata for a singular affair whilst celebrated society men jump from bed to bed with impunity. Armed with some very 20th century language, Anna will hold forth at the opera and exposes this hypocrisy, offering the doomed woman a welcome moment of triumph. There’s also a degree of sympathy for her abandoned husband, allowing an impressive McCole to flesh out the book’s sketched in bureaucrat as a human of noble, if dry, instincts twisted towards cold sterility.
The play also benefits from a fool in Miller’s Steva, providing comic relief throughout, a perpetually lust-sick buffoon who nonetheless exhibits genuine fondess for his friends and family. There are also some alterations to our character’s fates, particularly Levin. There’s no dying brother upon whose fate to meditate, and no struggles with faith and Christianity. Indeed this Anna Karenina is very much a zero-spirituality space throughout, what faith these players have must be in themselves, or each other. Where it holds, there is life, love, and possibility. Where it fails, only misery.
Ultimately, if Tolstoy’s novel is ultimately concerned with hope, this Anna Karenina is more occupied with its absence. Hers is a story short on heroes, but rich in victims of circumstance finding joy impossible to build upon the pain of others. Anna’s righteous anger against a hypocritical patriarchy blazes brightly, but in damning the costs of her decisions to herself and others, she ultimately conspires in her own destruction. Deep, dark, and sophisticated, this Anna Karenina is a feminist fable with real bite.
Anna Karenina plays the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh from 13 May 2023 to 3 June 2023. It is a Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Bristol Old Vic co-production.
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