Campaigning agendas and sociology have never influenced director Michael Atten borough's approach to theatre. "I'm interested in passion, the exploration of personal dilemmas, the things people do when they are in an emotional crisis, when they are in love or, as in this play, when they believe they are in love." His Royal Shakespeare Company production of Brian Friel's version of Turgenev's classic play, A Month in the Country, comes to Dublin next week as part of the Friel Festival. It was first produced by The Gate in 1991. Attenborough is adamant that it was Friel's version which drew him to the play. "I had not read the original version. For me the play is Friel's; it was his voice which drew me."
In either version, the heart of the play is the frustration of Natalya Petrovna, a young married woman bored by her life and her marriage to a rich, absentminded husband. She has become increasingly engaged in lamenting her lost youth. She has also become obsessed with her small son's tutor, a young man from Moscow. He in turn appears to be engaged in a flirtation with Natalya's ward, Vera, whom she has always regarded as a daughter but now sees as a rival.
"It is quite amazing; Natalya knows she is making a fool of herself," Attenborough says. "It is as if she is sitting back and watching herself on film but she just can't help it. Friel has telescoped this so well." Far more important than Natalya's love for the young man, which is more about her own confusions than him, is the way in which she risks her relationships with Vera and also Michael, a loyal friend who has willingly adopted the role of her unrequited lover. "She knows she is losing them and she knows they are far more important, and that the boy, the tutor, is just symptomatic of the state she is in, but she carries on with this madness," says Attenborough, with obvious disbelief. It is as if he is speaking about a woman he knows, rather than a character in a play he is directing.
"I'm fascinated by plays that explore the emotions and sexuality and the mad things we do in the name of love or sex or whatever. Look at Iago," he says, whose character is far more interesting than that of Othello. "He is an absolute study in paranoia and jealousy - and what's more, he knows it."
Now principal associate director at the RSC and to date probably best known for his exciting production of Romeo and Juliet (1997), which also toured, Michael Attenborough's theatre career began at Sussex University and quickly progressed. As associate director of the Leeds Playhouse between 1974-79, he directed 26 plays, including new works by Willie Russell, Alan Bleasdale, James Robson and Arnold Wesker. During his four years, beginning in 1984, at the Hampstead Theatre, the theatre was busy with 33 productions, five of which transferred to the West End.
Among them was his production of Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, "one of the most exciting plays I've worked on". He has been with the RSC since 1990. "I had actually applied for the job of artistic director, but I didn't get it - Adrian Noble did but he asked me to join." It was joining classical theatre at the deep end. His first production was Billy Roche's Amphibians. "I commissioned it," he says, adding he has been very impressed with Roche's A Handful of Stars at the Bush.
"For the first five or six years at the RSC, you watch and listen. Directing new work is very different. When was the last time anybody won a major directing award for directing a new play? With Shakespeare, it is completely different. The onus is on the director. The play is known - it is up to you to approach it differently. You see how people like Peter Hall respond to Shakespeare. And of course, it is different. It is written in verse. It is not naturalistic; it's just not the way people speak."
On arrival at Stratford, he was well aware that he had made his name with new plays, and that the RSC's repertoire would be different. "I love working with writers and actors when you're dealing with the classics. The authors are usually dead." The team aspect of theatre has always been important to him, and unlike many theatre directors, he seems concerned about the practicalities.
Small, logical and definitively un-luvvie, Attenborough, has a slight north-of-England accent, although he grew up in West Sussex and sees himself as a Londoner. It does not take long to spot his resemblance to his famous actor/ director father, Richard, especially as he was when playing Pinkie in Brighton Rock. Was he attracted to acting? He seems so amused by the question, it did not seem likely that he had ever acted. But he admits he did with Sussex University dramatic society, of which he was president. "It didn't take me too long to discover there were others more suited to it. I did a bit, and didn't let the side down . . . "
Drawing a definite distinction between directors working in theatre and those in film, he says, "in theatre, you are working with actors, and if it's a new play there's also the text, which is where you find the character". He stresses this point, reiterating, "a character should be given by the text - not by the actor. I feel very strongly about that. Characters live and exist in the text." The film director, however, is ultimately more concerned with the technical aspects of film-making. "The text becomes secondary. Most film directors have their own vision and ideas about how a story is told. The actors become part of the landscape; so does the script. In theatre, the actors and the text are the landscape."
Considering the massive influence the 19th-century Russian novelists such as Turgenev had and continue to have on the novel, their impact on theatre was far more limited. Attenborough is heartily in favour of playwrights writing new versions of existing plays, particularly with translated classics. "Translations tend to be done by translators rather than playwrights - that does not guarantee good plays."
Attenborough points out, as Friel has, that Chekhov was far more responsible for the emergence of Turgenev as a dramatist than the other way round. It is ironic that A Month In The Country seems so Chekhovian, considering it was written 10 years before Chekhov was even born. Turgenev never had any confidence in his dramatic skills, and as a playwright was born several decades too early. Written between 1848 and 1852, A Month In the Country was not produced until 1872, and as Friel has observed "the newness of its form baffled audiences and critics. Because it eluded classification they called it `old fashioned' and `undramatic'." Attenborough does not romanticise the Russian tradition; in fact he seems unusually under whelmed by it, Friel maintains that Turgenev and Chekhov combined to change the face of European theatre. The only previous Russian play Attenborough has directed was Uncle Vanya in 1977. Nor has he any intention of comparing the Friel text with its original, apart from describing the newer version as being "shorter, far snappier and funnier". Friel's also has a noticeably Irish idiom, albeit a refined one. Most of the characters are gentry.
Brian Friel has also written versions of Chekhov's Three Sisters and most recently, Uncle Vanya, and it could be argued that with Aristocrats (1979) he has written his own Russian play, albeit in an Irish setting. In 1986, Friel adapted Turgenev's finest novel, Fathers and Sons, for the stage. Five years later, in 1991, his version of A Month in the Country opened at The Gate. It is still a Russian play but with Irish modifications - a reference to Stendhal becomes Sterne - and that all-important Irish idiom which makes the dialogue flow so fluently.
Asked by me in 1991 why he chose to re-work an existing play, Friel replied, "I find the process - the exercise - of translating, both interesting and satisfying. Because you are presented with a complete fiction - given characters, given situations, given resolutions. Your `creative' responsibilities are circumscribed. You may present the characters with situations not in the original text, but if you do, these characters must still be subject to Turgenev's psychological imperatives."
They are - but Friel does open the play out. Attenborough makes no attempt to create a Russian atmosphere. "But there is a strong sense of the contrasts between outside, with the fresh air, the energy and the inside which is claustrophobic, tense, inert." The RSC production is set in period, but most of the English cast adopt Irish accents. "I've made no attempt to make it Irish," Attenborough says, yet he did want most of them to have the almost non-accent of the mid-19th-century southern Irish aristocrat. Whereas most of the characters are soft, Shpigelsky, the tough realist, whose tone is harsher, more cynically knowing, has an Ulster accent.
"Friel is very true to his voice - the sound inside his head is Irish," Attenborough says. "For me, in this play, in all plays, exploring personality is so much richer than depicting national traits."
A Month in the Country opens at the Gaiety on June 8th
