It must be Saturday because Anna Karenina and her husband, Alexei, are having sex. The act is passionless and mechanical. They are fully dressed, the silk of Anna’s metallic purple gown staying as unruffled as the buttoned-up jacket of Alexei’s uniform.
But they are not the only ones there. Drawing Anna away, first mentally, then physically, is Alexei Vronsky, her handsome younger lover, who turns a tepid bedroom scene into one of bodice-ripping lust. If you want to know why Anna is tempted, this is all the reason you need. Her husband slips out of sight.
Such is the porous nature of Lesley Hart’s full-blooded adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy novel. Her scenes flow into each other so you can’t see where one stops and the other starts. It gives the staging tremendous energy, bouncing from Petersburg party to rural estate with a pace as restless as Anna’s desires.
With a similar sense of theatre, Hart will freeze a significant moment – a look, a proposal – to let the characters stand back and reflect. It is a technique picked up with enthusiasm by director Polina Kalinina who opens with a painterly tableau of a decadent feast before animating the stage with constant movement.
The approach reaches its height in a circling conflict between the two central couples in an excellently acted production. While Anna (Lindsey Campbell) squares up to Vronsky (Robert Akodoto), whose allure is wearing off, Kitty (Tallulah Greive) loses patience with Levin (Ray Sesay), the husband who is too sensitive for his own good. Their arguments bounce across each other in a choreographed collision of ideas about love, fidelity and commitment, the themes of the novel finding theatrical form.
By this point, Campbell has gone from the pragmatic mother to a woman let loose from social constraints. Where she was calm facing down her jealous husband (Stephen McCole) and temperate placating her aggrieved sister-in-law (Jamie Marie Leary), now she is both imbalanced – heavy hints of Lady Macbeth – and free to speak her mind. Tolstoy’s melodramatic impulse means it can only end badly, but with the men variously feckless and detached and the women resistant and assertive, this is a sparky feminist cry for liberation.
• At the Royal Lyceum , Edinburgh, until 3 June. Then at Bristol Old Vic, 7-24 June.
