Jo Clifford’s intent to provide more than a dogged precis of Tolstoy’s novel is served when she jettisons one of the most celebrated opening lines in literature, but commences the work with a candlelit vigil and the brusque statement: “This is how it began.” Clifford instils the action with a briskness of purpose, as the cast step out of their roles to introduce themselves and explain their motivation: “Now I’m on a train to Moscow”; “I’m Katy’s father. I disapprove.” But the chief innovation of Clifford’s version, which was first seen at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum in 2005, is that it pares down everything to a couple of parallel, unhappy relationships: between Anna and her lover, Count Vronsky, and between the agrarian idealist Levin and his childhood friend Katy.
It works superbly, as if a vast five-act opera has been reorchestrated as a string quartet. Gone are the novelistic repetitions (Levin endures the humiliation of an unsuccessful proposal only once), as are the discursive passages on agricultural reform – though there is a perceptive parallel drawn between the conflicts of good husbandry and being a good husband. It ends, as drama decrees it must, with Anna’s suicide beneath the wheels of a train. Tolstoy’s novel spends a further 19 chapters tying up loose ends.
There’s an equally stark theatricality to Ellen McDougall’s production, which is shared with the West Yorkshire Playhouse. A channel of earth runs the length of Joanna Scotcher’s set, suggesting the soil in which Tolstoy’s characters are embedded and the spread of the railway that ultimately uproots them. It’s worth noting that the Royal Exchange has engaged another excellent, all-female creative team; Lizzie Powell’s ominously pulsing lights form a significant element of Anna’s encroaching breakdown.
The chemistry between Ony Uhiara’s Anna and Robert Gilbert’s Vronsky is explosive in the initial stages and toxic towards the latter; but their grand passion is counterbalanced by the belittling sense of domestic discomfort that sets in between John Cummins’s scatty, self-absorbed Levin and Gillian Saker’s quietly enduring Katy. There are welcome comic intrusions from Jonathan Keeble, whose pompous Karenin addresses his wife in subheadings; and Ryan Early’s feckless Oblonsky, whose serial adulteries are tolerated as endearingly colourful, while Anna becomes ostracised for her single offence. But that was the society in which Tolstoy lived – and perhaps we still do.
• Until 2 May. Box office: 0161-833 9833. Venue. Royal Exchange, Manchester. At West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds (0113-213 7700), from 9 May until 13 June.
