“We fight and we fight for what we believe in, and because we believe in it we think it is right.” So says an attendant at the Hermitage Palace museum to an anorak-clad 21st-century tourist at the start of Shared Experience’s touring production of Tolstoy’s epic novel.
This modern-day preface to the 19th-century action points up the work’s enduring relevance in a world ever more sharply divided by differences of belief. And when, gazing at an array of portraits of Russia’s military heroes, the English visitor admires their splendour yet struggles to tell them apart, it neatly introduces the Tolstoyan paradox of the force of history and the individual lives that comprise it. As opening scenes go, it’s a busy first five minutes.
Of course, Helen Edmundson’s adaptation has a lot of ground to cover. Shared Experience first presented her dramatisation of War and Peace at the National in 1996. In this new two-part version the novel obviously remains radically condensed; the staging focuses more on the salon and the ballroom than the battlefield. Edmundson struggles to encompass the complexity of Tolstoy’s existential discourse, perhaps unsurprisingly, since it is hardly inherently dramatic. More problematically, the scale of the narrative dwarfs the characters, so that we never know them intimately. Yet Polly Teale and Nancy Meckler’s production has momentum, and at its best a vibrant, involving immediacy.
Angela Simpson’s set of tarnished gilt mirrors and picture frames implies fragility and decay. Napoleon commands his troops from atop a grand piano and appears, dreamlike, at Pierre Bezuhov’s side, voicing the character’s internal psychological struggle. At a bitchy soir?e the knives are literally out when the guests brandish silver cutlery while performing a dance that becomes a battle charge. Sensuality is flavoursomely expressed in choreographic fantasy: Pierre imagines ravishing the glittering H?lène Kuragin; Natasha Rostov dreams of fluttering, a balletic butterfly, into Andrei Bolkonsky’s arms. Less successfully, synchronised flag-waving makes an inadequate Battle of Borodino.
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Barnaby Kay’s Pierre suggests steel beneath his bumbling manner, and David Sturzaker’s nihilistic Andrei has a cruelty and intelligence that make him wince as he wounds. Louise Ford’s Natasha develops touchingly from mischievous child to womanhood. And Jeffrey Kissoon is a bitter delight as the elderly Prince Bolkonsky, baiting and humiliating his love-starved daughter Maria (a poignant Katie Wimpenny). When, from the restless ebb and flow of emotion and action, a sense of their search for life’s meaning emerges, the production shines.
Box office: 0115-941 9419 (to 17 Feb, then touring: www.sharedexperience.org.uk)