Anna Karenina at Daltston’s Arcola

Helen Edmundson’s giddy adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s epic Anna Karenina is brought back to life at the new Arcola. The theatre attracts a stream of trendy young things in skinny jeans and kooky trainers, and an older, seasoned clientele who walk in drinking wine, quoting Tolstoy, and bewailing the antics of the Thatcher government.

Under Max Webster’s skilful direction, the warehouse conversion transforms into a glittering drawing room, a buzzing Moscow street, and a votive-lit altar, to tell the entwined stories of Levin’s idealistic love for Kitty, and Anna’s uncontrollable hunger for Vronsky.

At the beginning of the play, Levin, a shy Russian landowner, declares his love to his sweetheart Kitty. He suffers the misery of unrequited love, and returns disappointed and disillusioned to his first passion – his land.

Meanwhile, Anna, a bored wife of a wealthy politician, satisfies her hunger for meaning by falling for Vronsky, a dashing Byronic figure who heats her blood like her colourless husband, 20 years her senior, with his banal lectures on politics and his big offending ears, never could.

As Anna’s craving for Vronsky leads her from the empty life of a social butterfly to complete social suicide, Levin arrives at the realisation that love is not a perfect dream – that the reality both falls short of, and ultimately trumps, the fantasy.

Forming the backdrop are Anna’s brother Stiva and his wife Dolly who struggle to come to grips with Stiva’s chronic infidelity. Dolly and Anna are equally damned. Dolly chooses her family over her own betrayed feelings, even though she knows her happiness will be threatened by the next Bolshoi dancer, or any housemaid in a short skirt that catches her husband’s fancy.

Anna loses the goodwill of the Petersburg gentry when she gives up her son and leaves her husband to travel with her lover Vronsky. A theme throughout the book is the idea that though society is tickled by the sexual adventures of men, women pay the price for their own and their partners’ illicit passions – though the truth is, the book suggests, that women pay the price no matter if they follow their desires or not.

No one can accuse Tolstoy of brevity, and the danger of adapting his work is not knowing when to stop. This two-and-a-half-hour adaptation of a book that first appeared as a serialized epic drags a little, but despite that, it convincingly weaves storylines with physical theatre, spiffy set direction, humour, and a lilting soundscore.

This is not the first time Helen Edmundson has set herself the task of adapting a heavy duty Tolstoy novel. She adapted War and Peace for the National Theatre in 1996, and put her lightness of touch to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss for Shared Experience Theatre. While she retains the grim passions of Tolstoy’s novels, she sprinkles joy and humour into the adaptation, that keeps the story from being entirely world weary and cynical.

Anna Karenina is running until April 16 at:

Arcola Theatre
24 Ashwin Street
Dalston
E8 3DL

Image courtesy of Robert Workman