Helenistic | You Tube | May 9, 2000
Anna Karenina is the young wife of an older husband. She has an affair with the handsome Count Vronsky. By following her desires, Anna complicates her life.
Continue reading VIDEO: Anna Karenina Official Trailer and All Episodes
How should a woman live her life? Survive to the age of 70, fearfully, being as everyone else instructs her to be? Or play the heroine, passionately, in the knowledge that trying and failing need not equal defeat?
This is the timeless conundrum Tolstoy’s vivid heroine, Anna Karenina, took on, long before it became fashionable to discuss the conflict of desire and expectation in women’s lives. She was an original of her era, but what are the resonances of Anna’s story for the modern woman?
Born into the wealthy, decadent upper class of 19th-century St Petersburg, Anna confronts the hypocrisy of the day when she breaks free of an empty marriage after falling in love with army officer Vronsky. She scandalises her contemporaries when she chooses to live with him as his mistress, after her husband refuses her a divorce. But her passion for her lover is tempered by the pain of leaving her son and the disapproval heaped on her by the Russian aristocracy. Spiralling into depression and opium addiction, she starts to doubt Vronsky. A bout of morbid jealousy tips her over the edge and she throws herself under a train.
Tolstoy can’t have known, when writing a novel back in the 1870s, that trains rushing into tunnels would become a cinematic euphemism for sex. But his book about a Moscow political wife’s passion for a soldier – in which the speed of trains is a metaphor for the dangers and consequences of sexual passion – has consistently attracted film-makers. David Selznick cast Garbo in 1935, while Alexander Korda chose Vivien Leigh for the role in 1947. More recently, the writer-director Bernard Rose made a movie version with Sophie Marceau. Now Helen McCrory stars in a new four-part TV adaptation of Anna Karenina (Tuesday, 9pm, Channel 4).
Penelope Fitzgerald – a fine novelist who died last week – once expressed the hope that television would soon run out of great novels to adapt, and return literature to readers. But, although there are the inevitable losses – authorial tone and psychological complexity – Anna Karenina is, at the basic but crucial level of plot, the perfect book for TV.
Matt Wolf | September 6, 1999 | Variety
It takes a very special actress to burst the fey, densely plotted artifice that comes with the plays of Marivaux, but Helen McCrory is a very special talent indeed. Her amazing performance last year in “How I Learned to Drive” — a portrait of awakened sexuality both confident and fearful — transformed Paula Vogel’s play, and McCrory is scarcely less commanding amid the thicket of amorous intrigue that defines “The Triumph of Love.” Her surroundings on this occasion, however, aren’t nearly as happy as they were at the Donmar Warehouse last year, and even the staunchest of admirers may have trouble sitting through the (intermissionless) evening.
The problem is a production that is pitched somewhere between the Keystone Kops and “As You Like It” — McCrory and sidekick Tonia Chauvet would make a terrific Rosalind and Celia — of a play that is beloved by academics but is arid and even dull in performance, defying a decidedly eccentric supporting cast to bring it to tingling life.
Continue reading The Triumph of Love at the Almeida – Review
by Paul Taylor | September 5, 1999 | The Independent
HEROINES who go round disguised as men are as common in classical comedy as men who go around disguised as Barbra Streisand are in certain clubs. But few of the former breed are as single-minded as Princess Leonide, the central figure in Marivaux’s 1732 play The Triumph of Love, revived in a witty and beautifully judged production by James Macdonald.
The high curved hedges and sandy floor of Jeremy Herbert’s set evokes the rural retreat of the philosopher Hermovrate and his frumpy sister, Leontine, the kind of self-deceivedly high-minded couple to whom the mere mention of the word “love” is anathema. Since he was smuggled there as a child, this sequestered residence has been the secret home of Agis, the rightful heir to the throne usurped by Leonide’s family. Having fallen in love with him from afar, the Princess infiltrates the set-up in male disguise. Her aim is to win his hand and restore the kingdom to him. But as the daughter of his enemies, she can scarcely expect an immediate welcome and so feels the need to approach his heart via various incognitos.
Continue reading The Triumph of Love at the Almeida – Review