by Ivan Turgenev
Adapted by Susan Coyne
A Soulpepper Production
at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts
July 12-August 7, 2010

    If this were really a play about a month in the Muskokas (minus the scenery), Laszlo Marton may have gotten away with his coarse production. Marton and his set designer (Andrei Both) have turned Turgenev inside out. For one thing there is no pastoral feeling to almost anything on stage. The décor (consisting largely of dreary doorways and small windows, a tire-swing, an automobile carcass,  a hammock, a garden hose, and a bucket) has a closed-in feeling. If Marton and Both were after a visual metaphor for the characters’ sense of entrapment, they have achieved it, for with a few adjustments this set could easily go into a debased version of No Exit. Perhaps even worse than this, an audience is never quite sure where the characters are: in what region of what country and in exactly what time frame. There is a reference to duels and another to a carriage ride, yet the young tutor Belyaev plays on a skateboard and Natalya’s husband invents a wind machine that looks like an exaggerated fantasy. While anachronisms on their own do not invalidate an interpretation, they can confuse the issue by using mixed codes.

   Susan Coyne’s adaptation does its best to make Turgenev our contemporary, losing the graceful curves of Turgenev’s language, and vulgarizing characters with modern turns of phrase, such as Shpigelsky’s “Am I a fun guy?”—putting me in mind of the infamous Italian adaptation of Hamlet that contained the gem “To be or not to be/What the heck!” Turgenev’s play, as Stanislavsky rightly noted, weaves a “lacework of the psychology of love” and it demands a special kind of playing. Stanislavsky urged that one needed to suggest “unseen radiations of will, emotion, yearning,” and acting had, therefore, to “remove everything that made it hard for the spectator to enter into the actors’ souls.” Marton’s ensemble sometimes achieves this lacework, but these moments come more in the comedy (especially of Nancy Palk and Joseph Ziegler) than in the serious frissons. If the actors were playing a contemporary North American piece, I would say that their acting on the whole is very good, but our 21^st century modernity in naturalism is hardly the right scale or texture or colour for Turgenev who, it is true, anticipated modern psychology. This does not mean, however, that modern acting, without subtle fluctuations, an ability to handle Turgenev’s curves of feeling, or his period’s style, can achieve the play’s immediacy and depths of encounters.

      As I said earlier, if this were a Canadian play set in the Muskokas (minus the scenery), the production might have worked superbly, but Turgenev is elusive because his themes here are not merely sexual passion or frustration, thwarted or misdirected love, or deviousness in relationships, Turgenev allows his characters to move forward and backwards, up and down various scales of feeling, becoming larger or smaller as the moment requires. Characters drift in and out of the main frame, and the main plot (the complicated love story of Natalya Petrovna) and the sub-plot (the comic courtship rituals of Dr. Shpigelsky) are connected through an entire family and its satellites.

   Marton’s cast gives a fine reading of something that sounds more like Inge than Turgenev. A Month in the Country has worked best when a cast has had the luxury and privilege of a Michael Redgrave or Uta Hagen or Alexander Scourby or Luther Adler. Soulpepper has no one of that order, but it does have William Webster, Nancy Palk, and Joseph Ziegler who are veterans of the highest rank in Canadian theatre and performers of exceptional talent and versatility. Webster gives a fine account of the irritable but lecherous old German Schaaf, even showing a lubricious carnality. Palk as the spinster Bogdanova and Ziegler as the doctor Shpigelsky are utterly superb, delivering a proposal scene of unparalleled comic irony, exquisitely timed and scaled, and orchestrated to encompass and balance everything from her coquettish shyness and deep, teary-eyed eagerness to his shambling physical awkwardness and curvilinear but clear-sighted realism. There is no finer acting anywhere—not even at the Shaw or Stratford—and students or connoisseurs of great acting would be delinquent to miss it.

  There are other small pleasures in the cast. Hazel Desbarats as old Anna Islayev is good except for her untrammeled English accent. Michael Simpson is very good as the rich, aging and insecure suitor Bolshintsov, though his acting repeats effects he has already achieved in other roles. Jeff Lillico as the young Russian tutor Belyaev who is the object of Natalya’ adulterous yearning is his usual sensitive self, but the actor, as is his wont, pushes too hard at times and is bedevilled by his director’s modishly modern bent.

   Other performances are more problematic for a critic. David Storch as Natalya’s work-driven, cuckolded husband Arkady is too much in a bluntly straightforward key, while Tal Gottfried as Vera, Natalya’s young ward who becomes her rival for the love of Belyaev, is good in her girlish scenes but fails to register a convincing trope into a full-grown woman. The biggest problems concern two principal roles: the Natalya of Fiona Byrne and the Rakitin of Diego Matamoros. Byrne’s Natalya shows quick changes of mood without quite having a depth to match any quicksilver mutability. Nor does she project a credibly alluring sexuality. As for Matamoros, who seems to be a particular favourite among our newspaper reviewers and the Dora nominators, his Rakitin is little more than a synthesis of the actor’s usual and predictable strengths and flaws. Lacking physical or vocal grace, it is a drawling performance in a parched mode, for the actor always gives the impression of slowing down the rhythm of a scene as he falls back on his standard casual and quirky realism. Lacking any real charm, he also lacks the ability to suggest a subconscious. As a result of such casting, the production is neither swift nor stylishly light. It is sometimes limp rather than limpid, and its ebbs and flows of feeling are not enough to chart Turgenev’s tornado-like disturbances beneath the comic surface. 

Photos: Cylla von Tiedemann

pic 1: Diego Matamoros (Ratikin) and Fiona Byrne (Natalya)

pic 2: Joseph Ziegler (Shpigelsky) and Nancy Palk (Bogdanovna)


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