“All ideas are good,” according to the great theatre teacher Jacques Lecoq. “The question is: will they work on stage?” This production is bursting with ideas, but they haven’t reached concrete expression in performance.
Director Anthony Lau, designer Georgia Lowe and lighting designer Jack Knowles have taken Helen Edmundson’s celebrated 1992 ensemble-based adaptation of Tolstoy’s 1878 realist novel about families (happy and unhappy) and given it an early-20th-century Soviet theatre makeover. The stage is configured as a circus ring abutting a wall of doors (think Meyerhold; think Eisenstein before he moved on to film). Instead of a set, there are sculptural lighting effects (think Gordon Craig and/or Appia). This style is demanding. It sets the actors in sharp relief and demands incisive and imaginative direction.
