A Month in the Country review – delicate, tragicomic tangle of desire and disappointment

By Arifa Akbar · The Guardian Culture

Donmar Warehouse, London Brian Friel’s version of Turgenev treads lightly between humour and hurt as wayward passions rock a country house A bored hausfrau languishing in her marriage. A confidante who secretly loves her. A charge that falls for the handsome new tutor and an assortment of ancillary characters mirroring the cross-crossing drama of suddenly flaring passions and unrequited love. Add a drawing room in a summer-house and it becomes clear to see how Ivan Turgenev’s mid-19th century play, set in the heart of the Russian countryside, might have served as a blueprint for Anton Chekhov’s tragicomedies some decades later. Now add Brian Friel, whose sparkling script “after Turgenev” is spun so delicately that it appears both of its time and a universal story of pained love and marriage. The drama is simultaneously a comedy and a quiet – yes, Chekhovian – tragedy in which broad, entertaining characters rub alongside anguish and rejection (you can see the subtle influence of Turgenev’s play, in its pining mood, on Dancing at Lughnasa , written by Friel just two years later, in 1990). Continue reading...