A bored hausfrau languishing in her marriage. A confidante who secretly loves her. A charge that falls for the handsome new tutor and an assortment of ancillary characters mirroring the cross-crossing drama of suddenly flaring passions and unrequited love. Add a drawing room in a summer-house and it becomes clear to see how Ivan Turgenev’s mid-19th century play, set in the heart of the Russian countryside, might have served as a blueprint for Anton Chekhov’s tragicomedies some decades later.
Now add Brian Friel, whose sparkling script “after Turgenev” is spun so delicately that it appears both of its time and a universal story of pained love and marriage. The drama is simultaneously a comedy and a quiet – yes, Chekhovian – tragedy in which broad, entertaining characters rub alongside anguish and rejection (you can see the subtle influence of Turgenev’s play, in its pining mood, on Dancing at Lughnasa, written by Friel just two years later, in 1990).
