“This is my story”, says Anna Karenina near the start of this stage version of Tolstoy’s epic novel. She is swept away in a passionate love affair, only to realise she’s trapped in the prison of motherhood, marriage, and society’s strict expectations for how a respectable woman should behave. But in fact, this is two people’s story: the relationship at the heart of Helen Edmundson’s stage adaptation (first performed in 1992) isn’t between Anna and her love, Count Vronsky – it is between Anna and Levin, a parallel character whom she doesn’t meet till near the novel’s end.
Here, they circle each other from the start on designer Georgia Lowe’s fabulous Prussian-blue circular set, explaining their lives, their motivations. A neat theatrical contention is established: Anna or Levin ask “Where are you now?”, forming an invitation for the other to effortlessly transport us to a ball in Moscow or a country estate.
