Tension lost in the translation

This seemed not so much A Month in the Country as a whole year somewhere else altogether. In a limited sense it was. Ivan Turgenev's mid-nineteenth century drama of love unrequited and uninvited has been transported from provincial Russia to a vaguely Irish backwater. Brian Friel, has not, however, been content merely to give the play Celtic tones. This, according to his published text (Gallery Press, £6.95) is A Month in the Country by Brian Friel after Turgenev - a version so free it's a liberty.

Michael Attenborough's heavy-handed production, smudges the subtle lines of Turgenev's terrific original.

It's not that the play's essential framework has gone. Friel suit-ably concentrates his gaze upon different varieties of love and the comic-pathetic disruptions caused when Natalya Petrovna falls for her son's 21-year-old tutor. But Turgenev's play works as a period piece, catching the decade and spirit of landed, provincial gentry - "last relics of a collapsing semi-feudal regime" in Isaiah Berlin's words.

Belyayev, the cute tutor who speaks for a new generation's classless intelligentsia, and Vera, Natalya's ward who's smitten by him, represent an imagined Rus-sian future where the hard-working and happy will overwhelm the tottering, tarnished gentry.

With a welter of Irish accents, save for the Scottish timbre of Jack Tarlton's Belyayev, the play's social contextualising vanishes. Friel's alterations ensure an air of broadly comic joviality lingers like fog.

Tom Piper's spartan set, with its white satin back-cloth and chaise-longue evokes no place, season or atmosphere.

There's none of Turgenev's crackling emotional voltage or subtle sex-war psychology. Talk of "being centred" and of a "GP" doctor gives a false, modern ring. Sam Graham ridiculously plays Turgenev's alter ego, Rakitin, the family friend rent asunder by unrequited love for Natalya, as if an icy waxwork. Sara Stewart merely gives the captivating morally rotten Natalya the petulant, sexy, winsome airs of a bar manageress who mixes a sweet cocktail.

Jack Tarlton's morose tutor might drive any woman wild with boredom. Only Lloyd Hutchinson's nicely comic doctor and Catherine Walker's girl caught out by love are bracing antidotes to the sense of a classic opportunity missed.

A Month In The Country