Forest
The Forest at National – Lyttelton
It seems appropriate that after playing the predatory Miss Jones in TV’s RisingDamp, Frances de La Tour should eventually turn up in the role of the predatory Raisa in Alan Ayckbourn’s version of Ostrovsky’s comic-satiric work, The Forest.
Although Ms de La Tour’s appetite for young men seems much the same, her material circumstances have changed somewhat since her days in a seedy sitcom bedsit. In The Forest, she is the wealthy owner of a grand country estate on the banks of the Volga, where she plays benefactor to distant relative, Aksyusha (Niamh Linehan), and the poor, but handsome Aleksey (David Bark-Jones). Alas, the estate is becoming less grand by the minute, because Raisa – in common with many landowners after the emancipation of serfs in the 1860s – has had to sell off huge tracts of woodland to make ends meet.
Mindful that she won’t be left with much of an inheritance to hand to her nephew, Raisa unwillingly enters into a transaction with an arriviste timber merchant by the name of Ivan Petrovich (Peter Gowen), who then proceeds to swindle her. It is this uncomfortable interface between landowner and peasant that provides Ostrovsky’s satire with its first target.
The other main satirical dart is aimed at divisions within the acting profession, as symbolised by a couple of down-at-heel itinerant thesps – Michael Williams’s Arkadiy (sporting a ginger crop that makes him resemble an older Ewan McGregor) and Raisa’s nephew, Gennadiy, superbly played by Michael Feast. Being a tragedian, the hammy Gennadiy feels he can claim superiority over his chum who is, after all, a mere vaudevillian. This is a snobbery that persists to this day – just witness the way the RNT recently left musical comedies out of its Top 100 plays of the century.
The Forest sub-plot features a clandestine love affair between Ivan’s son Pyotr (Darren Tighe) and the poverty-stricken Aksyusha. Raisa won’t allow Akyusha to marry beneath her, so she pretends her ward is already betrothed to Aleksey, even though the truth is she has designs on the young man herself.
In minor roles are two other TV stalwarts of days gone by, Windsor Davies and Frank Windsor. Davies is fairly unremarkable as Uar, a wealthy neighbour of Raisa’s (although it isn’t really a meaty role) while Windsor is only mildly funny as Karp, the butler. But elsewhere, director Anthony Page and adapter Ayckbourn ensure there are plenty of laughs in this multi-stranded tale. After 130 years, there are still many surprises to be found in Ostrovsky’s Forest; let s hope they put a preservation order on this one.
Richard Forrest
