ALL that is required for Johnny Hanrahan's adaptation of William Trevor's no-vella Reading Turgenev to be a theatrical success is a stronger sense of drama.
A co-production by the Everyman Palace and Meridian Theatre Company, this is a delicately poised version of an already delicate work. Hanrahan's special gift (and not merely on this evidence) is for the creation of atmosphere.
He has also cored the book for its aggrieved malice, and although he has chosen perhaps wrongly a narrative linking device, his rendering of dialogue efficiently sustains the work as a play.
What emerges is a strengthened sense of Trevor's theme as a metaphor for the fate of the class, and the church, as central to the plot.
Young Mary Louise is a rural Irish Protestant conditioned to a passivity which condones her unlikely marriage. She is roused from her subclinical unhappiness by her cousin who introduces her to Turgenev, forgotten grave yards, and the possibility of love.
On his death (rather baldly announced in the play) she falls into a coma of indifference and exiles herself to a private mental hospital from which, after 30 years, she is restored to what is left of her community and her church.
Sarah Alexander's direction punctuates the episodic style with psychologically pointed glissandos (the music is by John Browne) but allows significant closures to remain tentative.
All the cast play with conviction there is a compelling charm in Lesley McGuire's young Mary Louise Ciaran McIntyre gives her husband the baffled, dull kindness essential to his character, and Aine Browne reinforces the thematically important realism in Letty, who marries a Catholic vet and has a terrific time.
There's a lot of high heeled stamping about and sighing, and all the women wear un-comfortable clothes, but Paul Denby's lighting design warms the economic, angled and pastel washed set by Meridian.
