A red door hangs in mid-air over Mark Thompson’s spare, Perspex-panelled set throughout the first act of Patrick Marber’s Turgenev adaptation. (Marber has compressed A Month In The Country – 1848-50 – down to three days.) Beneath this door, characters move and speak with disquieting restraint even while it grows apparent that Arkady and Natalya’s household shelters (by my count) half a dozen distinct extra-marital romantic fixations, centring on Natalya and her teenage ward Vera, but also involving her young son's tutor, an ageing neighbour and the local doctor. It feels odd, perplexing. You wonder what Marber is up to.

After the interval it becomes apparent: he has been relentlessly setting us up for the release of all this tension. The door is now at floor level, and we are told it is the entrance to “the place of assignation”. None of the couples goes through it, but all have candid exchanges virtually on its threshold. By this point Marber is in such complete control that he does not need to unleash more than a couple of peals of thunder: we are fully aware that a storm is raging.

It is a masterly piece of work, as both director and adapter. The language of Marber’s text is unadorned; poetry is mentioned once or twice, as something implicitly alien to the collective consciousness here. And yet the same linguistic register can accommodate both anguished self-repression and equally hopeless heart-baring. Likewise with the staging: the first act is one of all-but-stationary tableaux, with freer movement breaking out in the second until a final return to virtually motionless composition. Both these aspects, the verbal and the physical, are perhaps best exemplified by Mark Gatiss as Dr Shpigelsky: in the first act he manages to be at once offhand and brisk, then he opens the second with a virtuoso sequence of proposing marriage when his back has just gone twang.

The central performances, though, are those of Amanda Drew as Natalya, too infatuated to see her selfishness, and John Simm as her husband’s best friend (and, inevitably, her unrequited lover… oh, I’d forgotten about him) Rakitin. Simm’s control in particular is beautifully judged, whether speaking out or remaining buttoned up. And, alongside his work as dramaturg on The Beaux’ Stratagem and his own new play The Red Lion, this summer at the NT is conspicuously Patrick Marber’s.
 
Written for the Financial Times.