THEATRE REVIEW: A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY
14 Jul'10

This 'Month' lost in modern times

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

If nothing else, time has proved that while morales and mores may change and evolve, human nature remains immutable.

And therein can be found both the greatest strength — and sadly, the fatal weakness — in Soulpepper's latest production — a (sort of) modern day retelling of Russian playwright Ivan Turgenev's A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY that opened Monday at the Young Centre.

A tale of love, lust and boredom in the Russian countryside, A MONTH may initially seem like pretty tame, even turgid, stuff to a modern day audience steeped in the goings-on of Desperate Houswive's and Sex And The City, but to a Russian audience of a century and a half ago, Turgenev's tale of a middle-aged woman of the aristocracy, developing an unrequited passion for her son's tutor would have been shocking stuff, violating as it did all sorts of taboos about age and sex and class. So one wonders why director Laszlo Marton (who, with Susan Coyne, adapted Andrew Mile's translation of the work for this production) has decided to set it, if somewhat haphazardly, in the present day where rather than affording any sort of insight into the characters, it just seems like another entry in the entertainment industry's ongoing game of musical beds.

That said, however, it's a decision that proves a winner for Fiona Byrne, who revisits the role of  the middle-aged Natalya with much more success in the this version than she enjoyed in the Shaw Festival's interminable Irish version of a few years ago. Here, she's a Natalya ripe and lush and clearly more than just a little undone by the physical passion that has only recently overtaken her — a passion clearly exacerbated by her own sense of a fleeting youth — and Byrne brings her to pulsating life.

However, as Belyaev, the new tutor sent to her country estate from Moscow seemingly to  awaken her passion, Jeff Lillico is up the creek without a paddle —  perhaps the only piece of sporting equipment lacking in Marton's attempt to turn his character into a modern sk8ter boy with a bizarre passion for hunting. Tricked out as part boytoy, part poolboy, Lillico's more camp councillor than a tutor, leaving the impression that his age is more like 16, rather than the 21 he claims.

Fortunately, Byrne has some help from impressive quarters elsewhere in the production. Stripped of the drunken excesses which Marton has brought to work by other Russian masters, Diego Matamoros actually does some highly credible ensemble work here as Rakitin, the man who represents a far more acceptable diversion from the tedium of Natalya's obsessive husband, played by David Storch, than a tutor drawn from the lower classes.

And as the neighbourhood doctor, Shpigelsky, Joe Ziegler manages to bring the same sense of timelessness to his performance as Byrne does to hers, sidestepping directorial myopia to serve the spirit of the play and leaving the production to sort itself out.

Sadly, in supporting roles, William Webster, Nancy Palk, Tal Gottfried, Michael Simpson and Hazel Desbarats join Storch and Lillico in the land that time seems to have forgotten — a world created by Marton and his misguided designers to resemble nothing more than a multi-purpose garage.

Mind you, their enthusiasm might have  been further dampened by Marton's fascination with water, which is sprayed, tossed, spilled and hosed all over the set throughout. Thanks as much to Marton's  strange hydrophilia as to his determination to ignore the changes in morals and mores that time has wrought, it can be said that, while this remains a great play and at least a few of the performances are mighty good, in the end, his production is simply all wet.