Come Dine with Anna
Anna Karenina is a hungry woman. She is hungry for recognition, she is hungry for love, for the power a woman should feel, for her child, for her life. Yet, when she has each of these things as separate courses, she is not satiated. She wants it all – one big feast of everything she wants, so she can devour it all in one sitting. A morsel is not enough.
Love is food for the soul – Anna likens love, this big, undefinable thing, to a table of food. Platter after platter, mounds of it, and she wants it all. She loves her son, but it is not enough. That one look. The journey on the train, and the love of the child she bore is not enough. She does try to resist, but a dance tips it all over the edge – just one dance, but the intimacy of two people flowing together, back and forth, swaying in time to the heartbeat of the other is enough to ruin anyone.
Lisa Dwan does it well – she can make you feel the pain and suffering of life and love while she has a watering can protruding from her forehead. There is something so wonderfully compelling about an adaptation of a famous novel – there is always something new, something fun and unexpected that appears on the stage in front of you. A speech isn’t a speech, an emotion isn’t an emotion – you feel everything so keenly and differently when you know that something old has been made into something new.
Marina Carr does just that, she compels her audience into feeling what the actors are feeling, seeing what they’re seeing, knowing what they know. Luckily, among all the bleak hurt, there is time for laughter. Laughter at people and laughter with people. The famous characters of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina come to life in a way few can hope to imagine them when they are trapped between the pages of a book. The modern asides and re-written explosions of emotion are as refreshing as they are amusing. The sight of a new born child that brings horror to the face of his father, is parried by the doctor telling him to “get a grip man, no one needs your existential crisis right now”. And he has a point. There was no time for us to dwell on the pain (except, perhaps, in the twenty minute interval) because we were there, we could no longer dwell on the pain than Anna could, nor on the cheeky comments made by Stiva – there is no rest for the wicked, and there was no rest for us. Fast paced, grim, funny and hopelessly desperate, we followed every word and every action, and hoped for the best.
If only the worst fights you could have were about something as simple as jam.
Standing as the first performance for The Abbey’s 2017 programme of events, Anna Karenina had a lot riding on it. Not least because of last year’s timely #WakingTheFeminists campaign in response to the Abbey’s programme only last year in which it was pulled up for a disturbing lack of female representation. This year however, amends were made with playwright Marina Carr in charge of the adaptation of the famous novel. In 2017, ‘The female question’ is not allowed to be forgotten, Carr makes sure of this, and a memorable speech by Anna brings it pointedly to home. She wonders out loud if “maybe in a hundred years from now women like me will be normal” she doubts it, and she’s not wrong. “It will be a long time before men will let women be and it’ll be even longer before women will let women alone”. Inserting feminist undertones into a classic novel ensures that the play is driven firmly into the ideology of a contemporary audience. Clearly Carr intended the storyline to resonate just as clearly now as it did in 1877. History does not change that quickly. Like all good theatre, this performance held a universal, timeless quality. Kudos to director Wayne Jordan for achieving this. One gets the impression that every audience member at any time could garner something new from the action that unfolds before them. The intentionally Irish accents and phraseology only served to add the perfect comedic macerate throughout the production.
Universality of thought and feeling is one thing however trying too hard to make this happen is quite another. By this I refer sadly to the Costumes in the play which seemed to belong to a myriad of different epochs with most of costume history represented within the time limit of the production: one minute imperial Russia with luscious fur coats, snugs and military uniforms; the next the swinging 60’s with floral maxi-dresses making a comeback and suddenly it’s the present with Vronsky lounging on a beach in a jarring pair of Chino shorts and a polo shirt.
A small complaint however for a production otherwise full of laughter, surprises and snow. Lots of snow. It’s on until the 28th of January. What are you waiting for?!
