Anna Karenina with Natalie Dormer at Chichester Festival Theatre – review

This year’s festival season at Chichester kicked off with a Russian classic in the form of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 satire, The Government Inspector. For the second play of the season in the main house, we stay in Russia but jump forward around 40 years to Leo Tolstoy’s sprawling epic of love, lust and betrayal, Anna Karenina. It’s – presumably – an unintentionally very Russian start to the season, but one that is warming up nicely to offer some real nuggets of greatness.

Phillip Breen both adapts and directs this rumbunctious new telling of Tolstoy’s story. In a production that is as stylish as it is fussy, characters are given robust shape within a profanity-laden text, revealing light in a way that is not generally associated with the War and Peace novelist.

Breen teases the humour out and very skilfully drives a path through the thick layers of plot to make a clear and accessible consolidation of a novel that was originally written in eight parts. Even so, at over three hours, there is still a hefty commitment needed in order to wade through the melodrama of it all, and with so much of the novel crammed in, there is only limited room for real character growth and any kind of emotional sincerity.

Central to Breen’s production is Natalie Dormer’s steely-eyed and beautifully composed Anna, a woman who leaves her husband and her son for the love of Seamus Dillane’s charming army officer, Vronsky. As word of Anna’s betrayal of her statesman husband (a nicely understated Tomiwa Edun) spreads, she is soon shunned by society and leaves for an exiled life in Italy.

Tolstoy explores other relationships alongside Anna’s and looks at new and blossoming passion in the form of Levin (a wonderfully still David Oakes) and his new excitable wife Kitty (Shalisha James-Davis on energetic form). Enduring love is tested as well with the philandering Stiva (a rollicking Jonnie Broadbent) and his long-suffering wife Dolly (a captivating Naomi Sheldon). There is also a lovely rendering of servant Petka from Les Dennis, a blink-and-you-miss-it moment of unassuming simplicity.

Set against a backdrop of innovation and growth in Russia, the advent of electricity, along with the railway, is the shifting force that will shake the country to its core. Breen litters the production with train motifs to demonstrate the burgeoning modernity that is approaching (as well as the impending ending). Despite this, the attitudes of society remain unwavering in their disdain of Anna, and in the place of women within a male-dominated world.

An omnipresent three-piece orchestra creates a quite brilliant soundscape of underscoring and romanticism alongside a discordant array of Hitchcock-like horror sounds composed by Paddy Cunneen. It’s a dazzlingly abstract device to maintain the momentum of an otherwise overly long evening, with quite extraordinary results that feel both fresh and at times grating in equal measure.

Breen hammers home his themes pretty hard – the word death is bizarrely projected at one point to denote a death scene that is already as plain as day, whilst jarring fourth-wall-breaking asides to the audience are shared only by those of married status. It allows the action to hurtle along pretty rapidly, but in doing so, we lose some of the mystery and the soul of Tolstoy’s creations.

Max Jones’ beautiful but cluttered staging manages to maintain a sense of time and space, whilst Ayse Tashkiran’s movement direction brings a contemporary feel to the storytelling.

It’s a bleak tale, that’s for sure. Love is compared to the flu at one point: “You just have to get through it”. There is little here for the romantics, but Dormer shines as Anna in a production that feels both epic and absorbing.