Shared Experience first tackled Tolstoy’s classic eleven years ago at the National Theatre following their huge success with ‘Anna Karenina’. However, while Anna’s doomed love affair proved a perfect match for a style of playing that makes physical the characters’ inner journeys, Helen Edmundson struggled to stuff Tolstoy’s baggy epic into a three-hour play. Now she has created a two-part version, lasting more than five hours, which allows the material to breathe. Not only do we get the very human stories of Louise Ford’s lively Natasha who grows up in front of our eyes, and of Barnaby Kay’s enthusiastic, bumbling Pierre, who is forever struggling with the meaning of life, but by starting in the Hermitage in 2008, we’re also made aware that the events described in the play between 1805 and 1812 have had a profound effect on Russia today.
With no narrator and a set that consists of little more than a few picture frames, chairs and a versatile grand piano, Nancy Meckler and Polly Teale’s production fluently unfolds as the action whirls between Moscow dances, the quiet of the countryside and the battlefield where the men dream of glory. In the tighter, more engrossing first part, Pierre marries disastrously, the Russians lose to the French at Austerlitz, and Andrei, wounded at Austerlitz, regrets his harsh treatment of his flighty wife Lisa. David Sturzaker’s Andrei is a dry stick whose contempt for the serfs becomes almost risible; but, in contrast, Katie Wimpenny is remarkable as his sister, the dignified and pious Maria, who longs for human contact.
Always difficult to stage, the battle scenes come off worst, feebly imagined with the soldiers waving white handkerchiefs as they advance; and by the end the company is in danger of losing its own war as it sinks under the weight of Tolstoy’s ideas. But there have been more than enough victories beforehand to make the long campaign well worth witnessing.
