Arts
Months in the country
Peter Jenkins
A Month in the Country (Olivier) Waiting for Godot (Old Vic) Peter Gill makes his debut at the National Theatre with a play ostensibly well suited to his distinctive form of direction. He invariably goes for psychological, intensity and depth, allowing nothing to stand in their way; he lays bare the text of his plays in productions which although stylish, almost stylised, are at the same time austere; he allows minimal scenery or props but likes elegant and bright costumes beautifully cut. Accustomed to working in large spaces (there can be no better apprentice shop for the Olivier than the Riverside Studios) he likes to space out his performers even for intimate scenes; they enter at a brisk walk and often exit at the double; when they move on stage they move with balletic grace and style but he does not allow movement to distract from speech and is parsimonious even with gesture; he insists that his actors and actresses listen intently. Turgenev's A Month in thee Country invites the attention of Gill's brilliant talents as a story of passion and jealousy written with the highest intelligence around a structure consisting of a series of duets, deep and extended, augmented by important soliloquies. Not surprisingly, therefore, the production was more reminiscent of Gill's Shakespearian and Jacobean work than of his Chekhov.
A Month in the Country is in no way, because it is a Russian play, a Chekhovian play. There is little conversational music to it, not much sense of a great house and estate (it was written before the Emancipation), and it doesn't have a great deal of Russian atmosphere; one can imagine it easily as a French play. Moreover, and this is one reason why it is such a remarkable piece of work, it was written ten years before the birth of Chekhov, in 1S5O. Because the words paint in so little of the background and convey so little of mood I missed in this production the aid of a set. The play, after all, belongs to the age of realism and its author would have seen no need to refer to what he would expect that we would be shown. All that we see in Alison Chitty's design is a bare platform above which a slatted contraption of wood, somewhat like a washboard, is used to simulate exterior and interior scenes. I thought this an irritating and obtrusive device, especially when the taller performers were obliged to duck their heads in order to exit beneath it.
Without the assistance of physical aids to realism Gill's production was bound to depend chiefly on two considerations. One was whether the play would stand up to the depth of his exposure and the other, by no means unconnected, was whether the power of the acting could sustain a production so austere over the three hours and five minutes which it takes to give the full text. It came to seem a long month in the country. Partly, I suspect, this is because Natalya Petrovna, although a fascinating character (and a juicy part for an actress), falls short of being a tragic heroine. She is no Anna Karenina, rather — as the rascally-cynical family doctor observes— a kind woman who can't control herself, who loses her head. She becomes infatuated by a young man — that's all. Partly, also, it may be that Francesca Annis, although for most of time superb, does not quite have the range to carry her performance through its whole length.
For the first half of the production she is magnificent, especially in the long soliloquy (played from right down-stage) in which Natalya expresses self-amazement at what she is doing, and at the enormity of her destruction of the happiness of her 17-yearold ward, and yet is compelled to declare herself 'in love for the first time in my life.' But it is the greenhouse scene in the second part of the evening which is the most crucial scene in the whole play and which requires the actress playing Natalya to pull out yet more emotional stops. It is in this scene that she first declares her passion for Aleksei and then must deal with Vera's discovery of her treachery.
Gill has the actress play the first part of the scene at ten or 15 paces from the actor whom he holds motionless throughout, head bowed and face averted from her; and during what is a lengthy speech he allows her no more than two gestures, a gentle clasping of the hands, the placing of a hand on heart. This was to push his method to a daring extreme and it was from here that I began to wonder about the actress's vocal and emotional range, to notice Turgenev tending to repeat himself rather than going deeper, and to feel the play in danger of overstepping the threshold of melodrama. From that scene on, directed with such ruthless purity, the play never quite recovered the full authority of life.
The supporting acting is first class, especially from Nigel Terry as Rakitin, Natalya's lover, and Robert Swann as Arkadi, her husband. Michael Gough as the doctor won rounds of applause on the first night for the scene in which he coaches the unspeakable Bolshintsov in the courtship of Vera and for the one in which he himself makes what must be the most unromantic proposal of marriage in the history of courtship. Isaiah Berlin's translation sounded well throughout and in the lighter moments of the play caught something of the irresistible wit and charm of his own conversation.
As nobody knows what Waiting for Godot is supposed to be about you can do anything you like with it including making South African blacks out of Estragon and Vladimir and turning Pozzo into an Africaner slave-master. Donald Howarth's production from the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town, which is visiting the Old Vic provides an opportunity to see the fabled acting partnership of Winston Ntshona and John Kani. I enjoyed. seeing them in action, finely tuned to each other's light touch, under-playing most of the time and infecting the play with that shrugging kind of tragi-comic resignation which is characteristically black. Whether they or the production make any sense of the play I cannot say for I have never been able to make sense of it myself and I confess to wicked hopes that Beckett may yet turn out to be not a genius but a charlatan.
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