You can't fault the ambition of Patrick Sandford's Southampton venture. He has imported four Russian actors and a designer to work with an English team on John Clifford's bold new play about the overlap between Tchaikovsky's life and his art. But not even a fruitful international collaboration can prevent this seeming thematically overloaded.
Clifford's idea is to find in Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades a key to the composer's own life. Thus the aged Countess who, in the story, possesses the secret of the fortune-creating three cards, transmogrifies into the real-life Madame von Meck who bankrolled the composer. And, just as the fictional Hermann is torn between money and love, so the composer himself battles with the pull of art and sex. Meanwhile, a ghostly Tchaikovsky surveys events from the vantage point of 1917.
In essence, this is a dream-play; but even dreams have to have an internal logic, and it is hard to discern anything of that nature here. In particular, the parallels between Pushkin's Hermann, who is a calculating fortune hunter driven to the brink of murder, and Tchaikovsky, who enjoyed a platonic, epistolary love affair with his patroness, seem forced. And, just as we are getting immersed in one narrative strand, Clifford introduces another.
But when it focuses on the Queen of Spades story, the play has a certain power. Against the background of a fine constructivist set by Vadim Tallerov, the Anglo-Russian cast do a first-rate job. Sergey Girin, with the aid of surtitles, makes a handsomely haunted Tchaikovsky, and Philippa Urquhart embodies all the Countess's whaleboned hauteur. Good work, too, from Barry Aird as the obsessive Hermann and Anna Nosatova as the Countess's beautiful niece. All strive hard, in Sandford's time-bending production, to make sense of what seems as much a phantasmagoric collage as a play.
· Until May 26. Box office: 023-8067 1771
