Tolstoy - Love, Hypocrisy & Deceit

Leo Tolstoy was destined to be a man in conflict from the day he was born - an orphan by the age of nine and a noble who was to spend the best part of his life seeking a simpler existence in the decades before Russia's game changing revolution.

But, out of that personal maelstrom came what are regarded as two of the greatest novels ever written, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the latter falling under the spotlight at the West Yorkshire Playhouse last night as part of Jo Clifford's stage adaptation.

When you get into Tolstoy, Chekhov or any of the pre-revolutionary writers, you can invariably expect something deep and requiring of intelligent thought; quite how Clifford was going to distil more than 850 pages of the master's novel down to two hours of intelligible drama I was not entirely sure.

However, with 30 years in gestation, Clifford, has had a while to contemplate her task and, interestingly, chose to transition Tolstoy's work into a play for modern audiences rather than seeking to produce a literal interpretation of a 'Russian work'.

And that was the interesting thing for other than a few Eastern European names, Anna Karenina, didn't sound very Russian at all although it remains faithful to Tolstoy's central theme of love and the price people pay for following their hearts, certainly at a time in history when conventions were rigid.



The stage set included a central, open floor area featuring soil, symbolic of how dirty love can be, and it was quite pointed that those with the most heartache, the passionate, soulful Anna (Ony Uhiara) who has a 'shameful' affair with Count Vronsky (Robert Gilbert) were the ones so often walking or rolling in the dirt. Those who never left their emotional comfort zones continually gave the soil a wide birth.

Anna Karenina is a play about societal conventions and the consequences of breaching established rules. As the main protagonist embraces the new found happiness of her 'affair' - she had been unhappily married to a boring bureaucrat - so she becomes unhappy as friends and acquaintances slowly ostracise her. "Now there is just the empty dark and it frightens me."

This was an intense play full of love, hypocrisy and deceit. It was ok for the terribly casual and naiive Oblonsky, beautifully played by Ryan Early, to shag around but, somehow, not alright for Anna to follow her deep felt love for the Count. One was just a boy about town, the other an up-market whore because she was married; mind you, so was Oblonsky!

There were some great performances and I particularly enjoyed the recurring theme of 'losing touch with the land'. The soil, as I said, became symbolically tied to the concept of love, however, it was also about the people and those 'losing touch' were the Aristocrats, about to be knocked firmly off their perches in the looming revolution.


I think Clifford has achieved something. But, for fear of sounding, indecisive, I think that the intensity of the subject matter is like seeing a 'new' Shakespeare for the first time; it is better for a second viewing because, at first, it is like too much fine dining, it can overwhelm your system.

Anna Karenina is passionate, powerful and speaks to the soul because there are only two types of people - those who have been hurt by love and those who have lived their life in a bubble for fear of what might happen if they stray from it....Clifford's play caters for both.

Until June 13th (2015) at West Yorkshire Playhouse