The White Guard

The human reality of civil war, in all its chaotic incompetence, despair, fear, confusion and desolation, is evoked with vast compassion and wry, clear-eyed wit in Mikhail Bulgakov's sprawling drama. This new version by Andrew Upton is both nimble and pungent, and Howard Davies's production aches with compassion and conviction.

In a scene redolent of Chekhov, we discover the Turbins, a White Russian family at their Kiev home, facing a terrifyingly uncertain future in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917. As the snow falls outside the windows, there is warmth - particularly towards the mistress of the house, Justine Mitchell's sensual Elena - music, and vodka. But as, in an impressive coup de thé‚tre, Bunny Christie's set slides sickeningly away, the domestic milieu dissolves first into a pantomimic mess of politics and then into the bloody mayhem of battle as the German puppet government pulls out and the Ukrainian Nationalists and the Red Army move in.

The sheer scope of the action can be a little bewildering, but the emotional detail grips. Particularly potent is Elena's climatic speech, as what is left of the family reunites, in which she denounces the sacrifice of every individual life, the loss of every mother's child. Her raw emotional outcry is poignantly set against the realpolitik of Conleth Hill's charming moral chameleon Leonid, who flees his post as aide-de-camp to the Germans with a stolen solid gold cigarette case in his pocket, and who, in the ensuing unrest, acquires a comfortable new engagement at the opera and a scruffy coat he wears to deflect unwanted attention and describes as 'essence of prole'. The Turbins' old way of life is over; expediency like Leonid's is the best chance of survival. But it's the echo of Elena's agonised voice that lingers.