Anna Karenina, Sheffield Crucible, review: it’s hard not to be seduced

“This is my story,” says Anna Karenina at the start of the Crucible’s first in-house 50th anniversary production. “Seems to be mine as well,” says Levin.

Forget Tolstoy’s line about happy and unhappy families – arguably the most famous opener to a novel in history. Helen Edmundson’s 1992 adaptation of his 1,000-page masterpiece is instead innately conceptual, casting Anna and Levin (Tolstoy’s semi autobiographical, philosophically anguished farmer) as dual narrators talking to each other across time and space and thus setting up what we see as less a panoramic vista of 1870s imperial Russia than as a series of personally selected memories. “Where are you now?” they keep asking each other, like an existential refrain from a song.

The source novel contains multitudes as it sympathetically charts Anna’s adulterous affair with the dashing officer Vronsky against a Russia convulsively moving away from feudalism towards modernity. Edmundson strips away much of the social context (no long lectures on agricultural policy here) to concentrate instead on the inner lives of her characters, with pocket scenes blending casual realism with fearful premonitions and projected desires.

It was first staged by Shared Experience, and director Anthony Lau borrows from that company’s playbook in his dream like production, which takes place on a circular, virtually bare stage. Props are minimal and all the more startling when they appear, such as the flashing bright green hula hoops used as peasant scythes in the fields.

There are jarring disruptions in style and period that seem to accentuate the extent to which Anna, ostracised by a delightedly scandalised high society, is on the outside of her world, looking in: at the opera, three women in psychedelic lamé, like ghoulish apparitions from a future disco, throw cake. Meanwhile, Stiva, Anna’s feckless brother whose shameless philandering prompts no criticism whatsoever, lounges in a silver suit. Kitty, over whom poor besotted Levin agonises, zips about in taffeta skirt and roller skates, like a fairy just out of reach.

It all risks feeling a bit featherweight, particularly when combined with the understated naturalism of the text, albeit handled beautifully well here by Lau’s eight-strong cast. Yet it’s anchored in two extremely good performances. As Anna, Adelle Leonce combines poise and assertiveness with palpable yearning and despair as her circumstances shrink and tighten. As the Eeyorish Levin, Douggie McKeekin – excellent in Nina Raine’s recent Bach and Sons at London’s Bridge Theatre and just as wonderful here – invests this awkward maverick misfit with bitter self-disgust, comic warmth and aching sincerity. “I want a family so much,” he says, and your heart slightly breaks.

Everyone else is, deliberately, mere bit parts in this parallel psychodrama including, symbolically, Chris Jenks’s Vronsky, who is a cipher in stiff epaulettes, although Isis Davis’s straight-talking Dolly is a thoroughly modern woman, constantly balking at the suffocating misery of motherhood. There is something artfully suspended about Lau’s production, as though it exists only in the minds of its characters, and a lingering suspicion that it is a wee bit too entranced by its own beautiful reflection. But then, to be fair, so was I.

Until Feb 26. Tickets: 0114 249 6000; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk