THE QUEEN OF SPADES. To 15 November.
Glasgow
THE QUEEN OF SPADES
by Aleksandr Pushkin translated by Angela Landon
adapted by Jon Pope
Citizens' Theatre Circle Studio To 15 November 2003
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat 8 November 3pm
Runs 55min No interval
TICKETS: 0141 429b0022
www.citz.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 October
Brief, intense, dark: matching Pushkin's fateful story.Greed, deception, murder-threats, manipulation of an innoocent young woman's affection: this is Imperial Russian noir - with enough palace back passgaes and candelabra-lit secrecy to add touches of Gothic.
The Circle Studio at the Citizens' is just the place for all this, its three audience rows coralling the tight acting area as light plays on and reflectively from, the mirrored surfaces of the set and ceiling.
Like Henry James' Turn of the Screw, Pushkin's story tempts dramatisers for its theatircal possibilities. The problem with both is that, once characters and events are taken from our imaginations and set before us, there's an urge to seek explanations which neither writer provides, nor needs to on the page.
Ghermann seems able to withstand his fellow army officers' gambling, and the fighting it produces. As uniformed colleagues shift the deck round the huge central table dominating the little stage, he sits in civvies at the side.
But he's drawn in when hearing of a decrepit countess with knowledge of an individual 3-card trick: three cards to bet on which will win a fortune for him.
Through her vulnerable companion (Ghermann's face is glimpsed by her over the stage, frosty as the face at the window it's meant to be) he obtains access to the old woman - a fine portrait of age and vanity by Imogen Claire.
Threatening her with a pistol, he's finally told the secret by the dying woman, and is unable to see it's given as a curse. for the Queen of Spades appears in place of the fortune-winning ace, ruining Ghermann.
It may be experienced card-players can pick up references denied the rest of the world, but it seems realistic detail isn't the point. Rather it's a study in greed and compulsion. The dark production, colour-drained and irradiated by Melville's occluded self - Lorna McDevitt's Lizaveta is a human contrast, Garry Collins' gambling-chief Tchekalinski a suitable grotesque for the world into which Ghermann's obsession takes him.
Bright, thin shafts of light pierce but never wipe away the dark - rather, they emphasise it. Once it's overcome the temptation to resort to narration - which marred Pope's adaptation here of Wide Sargasso Sea last month, this version illuminates the dark caverns of human consciousness under the command of compulsion. Watchable if not explicable.
Ghermann: Mark Scott Melville
Tomski: Pete Ashmore
Narumov/Tchekalinski: Garry Collins
Countess Anna Fyodotovna: Imogen Claire
Lizavetas Ivanovna: Lorna McDevitt
2003-10-31 12:39:24