Eugene Onegin | Adelaide Festival 2021 review
Lithuanian director Rimas Tuminas calls on the remarkable and versatile skills of his big ensemble in homage to Pushkin’s poetry.
Adelaide Festival
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Eugene Onegin
Theatre / Russia
FESTIVAL
Her Majesty’s Theatre
March 5
Pushkin’s verse novel has encouraged many attempts at adaptation. It is a permanent open enticement for any great artist, so resonant are its themes.
Set in the 1820s Eugene Onegin is a St Petersburg decadent – a more admirable version of Pushkin himself – who brings his world-weary experience and ennui to bear on an innocent country estate.
His closest friend Lensky has fallen for one of the family’s daughters, Olga, and her younger sister Tatyana becomes besotted with Onegin. What unfolds is a tragedy but also a great love unrequited where, unusually, the heroine is the final arbiter.
In this production by Lithuanian director Rimas Tuminas, the novel is unbound. Tatyana’s love is expressed not so much in Pushkin’s verse but in a fabulous scene as she all but destroys her bed in balletic paroxysms of ardour.
Tuminas has called on the remarkable and versatile skills of his big ensemble, as actors, ballerinas, ballad singers, and as physical performers on a grand scale.
He is equally at home employing music themes and stage effects including a moving, darkly mirrored backdrop that hints at all sorts of changes of scene.
At times his inspired moments of stage imagery communicate the plot directly to the audience with assurance and economy.
When he does visit Pushkin’s verse, delivered in Russian with English subtitles, it is as homage to Pushkin’s poetry without it weighing on the production. Instead of Pushkin’s witty epigrams on the drawbacks of country life we have hilarious moments of highly skilled buffoonery.
In this version, Her Majesty’s was turned into a live stream venue direct from the Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia in Moscow, where we could exchange greetings with an equally live matinee audience. The technology was sufficient to bring the drive and genius of the production loud and strong.
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