MADAME BOVARY: BREAKFAST WITH EMMA. To 22 November.

Tour

MADAME BOVARY: BREAKFAST WITH EMMA
by Fay Weldon adapted from Flaubert

Shared Experience theatre company on tour to 22 November
Runs 2hr 10min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 October at Oxford Playhouse

Very clever - now, shouldn't we be moving on?In recent years, Shared Experience has cornered the market in staging novels built round women - Anna Karenina, Maggie Tulliver (stronger than brother Tom in George Eliot's Mill on the Floss), Jane Eyre. Adaptations by Helen Edmundson and director Polly Teale have used theatrical techniques to dramatise the novels' inner-workings. Their Tolstoy was especially innovative; their Bronte particularly revealing. But all good things have their end.

Fay Weldon not only departs in detail from Flaubert's Madame Boivary. She reduces it - and not only in a selective way that highlights aspects of the original. The Shared techniques seem to be wearing a bit thin as they're parcelled out across more works.

Of course, this is the old critical ingratitude trick. Let others do the creativity bit, admire for a few moments then yawn in bored habituation as if it had been your idea all along. This production must justify itself for its restrictions and freedoms - what it misses out, what it changes - but it's still finer than many of the literal adaptations that try to cram several hundred narrative pages on to a stage evening's confined spaces of time and location.

However, we are talking the high standards this company - back to its 1970s origins under Mike Alfreds, with versions of the Arabian Nights and Dickens - has helped set. It makes its story clear, but at the cost of richness of texture.

Jonathan Fensom has designed a set - a room tapering to a point that suggests the restrictions Emma Bovary - France's Hedda Gabler - feels in her provincial husband and his life, and which her profligacy increases.

Emma's retail therapy creates her fantasy self-image and imaginings of a high-life that ends up bringing her down. Heaven help her in the age of glossy consumer mags and readily-available credit cards.

Fensom's set also has enough doors to kick-start a French farce. But here they're deployed for serious ends: even the portals mean confinement. From outside comes the crow-like postman with bills - he doubles as a gravedigger.

From the house comes the sloppy, insolent - and unpaid - servant Felicite with bad service, lies and sarcasm. Or Emma's mother-in-law, in the first of the cold lighting-inflected flashbacks, to recall her warnings to son Charles against marrying this flighty piece.

Past moments are invoked around - and, in the case of dances, on - the breakfast-table which serves as unifying item, as husband and wife become increasingly bitter and successive posts bring worsening financial pressure.

It's well performed. Amanda Drew conveys both Emma's superficiality and vulnerability. There's genuine feeling beneath the conceited loathing; it's possible to feel sympathy as well as contempt for this Mme Bovary.

Adrian Schiller gives her husband a similar mix from the opposite side of the round table, making miseries even. Yes, he's tedious, and an unsuccessful doctor. But he's also someone who sacrificed such qualities as he might have had for his own dream of a glamorous bride.

Elsewhere, Joanna Scanlan subtly shifts modes, between respect for the master and contempt leading to deliberate insubordination for the mistress, while Maxwell Hutcheon's splendidly oily then threatening as a draper turned creditor.

For someone coming first-time to a Shared Experience adaptation, there's enough to make a satisfying, intriguing evening. And , between them, Weldon and director Polly Teale, find the spirit of Flasubert's world. But, with a great big world of unseen theatre pieces from the past and new scripts crowding, it seems this company's ploughed its particular furrow deep as it'sl ikely to go for now.

Madame Bovary: Amanda Drew
Lhereux Lestiboudois: Maxwell Hutcheon
Felicite/Mother: Joanna Scanlan
Charles: Adrian Schiller
Leon/Rodolphe: Simon Thorp

Director: Polly Teale
Designer: Jonathan Fensom
Lighting: Chris Davey
Composer: Howard Davidson
Movement director: Liz Ranken

2003-10-05 15:16:24