Review

Today's review is of Anna Kareninain the Gate Theatre, Dublin

It has regularly been hailed as the greatest novel ever written, frequently summed up as a tragic romance, and often understood to be a passionate evocation (and heart-felt critique) of 19th-century Russia.

But when Leo Tolstoy sat down to write Anna Kareninain 1873 his first concerns were for "characters, acts and situations". After the essentials of storytelling, everything else could spring.

Such a heartening simplification of his epic, complex work, seems to ally Anna Kareninato the stage, and emboldened Helen Edmundson's 1992 stage adaptation for Shared Experience to adopt a fleet-footed approach to the tale, without diluting the story's rich complexity.

The new Gate production, directed by Michael Caven-Barker, preserves Edmundson's nimble devices, aided by an agile ensemble of players, an unobtrusive design and a bounty of striking visual moments.

Yet there remains a curious tension in the production, as though the story has been freed from the pages of the novel, but become bound instead to the aesthetic of Shared Experience.

Edmundson's main conceit is to make Tolstoy's twin (but separate) protagonists the play's narrators, here allowing Peter Gowen's vividly conflicted Constantine Levin and Paris Jefferson's rather varnished Anna to step outside the narrative and share details of their contrasting journeys.

"Where are you now?" is a typical prompt.

"On a train," is a typical response, but a more genuine answer might be: somewhere between ecstasy and torment.

Simon Higlett's design invests a lot of effort into constructing an essentially bare stage, constructing the shell of a train station - where the story's early "evil omen" takes place, and where Anna reaches her fateful climax - its flexible performance space.

Here Barker-Caven can summon a chattering society of Muscovites or scything rural peasants, while hastening the action along with accomplished set pieces.

One superb physical sequence folds the novel's famous racing scene into Anna and Vronsky's consummated adultery; as the cast enact galloping, snorting horses, the adulterers' passions appear hasty and carnal.

Such an earthy union of passion and pessimism is certainly in keeping with the book, but Jefferson's Anna and Jonathan Forbes's Vronksy make for unsympathetic, if attractive, lovers.

Instead, Gowen's more compelling Levin and the arresting trajectory of Lisa Lambe as his long-desired Kitty (from doll-like fantasy to fiery reality) ring with more emotional depth, while Michael James Ford and Andrea Irvine offer strong support as a cheerful, serial philanderer and a wife stripped of illusions.

If, over three hours, the production can feel unwieldy and uneven, that may be accentuated by the play's minimalistic origins with Shared Experience and the Gate's reputation for more ornate costume drama.

But, like its heroine, even if this Anna Karenina is not always easy to love, it never loses its power to seduce.