If it looks like a Chekhov play and it pines wistfully in the pre-revolution Russian countryside like a Chekhov play… that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a Chekhov play.
Sure, Lyndsey Turner’s deft revival of Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country uses a not un-Chekhovian 1992 translation from Brian Friel; okay the bulrushes on Leslie Travers’ set could have been recycled from last year’s Barbican Seagull; yes it’s a story about a sprawling cast of dysfunctional aristocrats and their hangers-on falling apart on a country estate. But even in spite of all that, a little time with the play reveals it to in fact be very much its own thing.
At the heart of this particular country estate is Sophie Okonedo’s jaded aristo Natalya Petrova. Legally, even wealthy women lacked real power in 19th century Russia. And yet even if Natalya doesn’t have any particularly grand ambitions, her flinty force of will, elegant looks and scorched-earth approach to anyone who annoys her means the teeming denizens of the house bend to her whim and hang on her mood. She is a much more forceful presence than her technology-obsessed husband Arkady (Thomas Arnold), who spends his days cheerily prattling around with his unreliable new winnowing machine, oblivious to the fact his pal Michel (Alistair Petrie) is in love with his wife, and that she has designs on their daughter’s tutor Aleksey (Patrick Gibson)
Although there is a moment where Daniel Rigby’s sublimely annoying doctor Ignaty drops his loser facade and hisses molten thoughts of revolution, A Month in the County feels less like an elegy for the passing of an age, and more like the age at its zenith. Which is what you’d expect: it was written in the mid-1800s, before Chekhov was even born. Yes, it's a delicately bittersweet drama about a group of disaffected eccentrics incapable of finding love with the right person. But it’s also about the power of the upper class – the blinding, disorienting power Natalya is afforded by her social status and implacable self-belief. Nobody in the house is safe from her whims. Aleksey describes her in reverential, religious terms. It’s not healthy.
But she’s not a monster. Okonedo is too versatile and subtle an actor for that: her Natalya is vulnerable and human and constantly apologising for the mess she makes of everyone else’s life. It’s not really her fault she is who she is, but she can’t - or won’t - change.
Away from Turgenev’s observations on the aristocracy is a broader, sometimes out-and-out goofy comedy with some very daft minor characters, most notably Mark Hadfield’s German tutor Herr Schaaf whose constant stream of filthy malapropisms leave you somewhat confused as to whether he’s a massive perve or not. And then there’s the afore-mentioned Ignaty, who spends much of the play acting as a sublimely cringey clown - but who also possesses a piercing self awareness everyone else lacks.
Despite the superfluous minor characters (and the fact it takes a little while to get going), A Month in the Country comes good before long, a play of stature with a towering female lead role that’s a gift to an actor of Okonedo’s powers.
