War and Peace Part One

Published Friday 8 February 2008 at 17:45 by Pat Ashworth

This is a huge theatrical event, not just in the performance of the double bill in a single day, but in the great intellectual buzz it engenders. Not only do you emerge feeling you have had a ringside seat at momentous events of history, but that you have somehow absorbed Tolstoy’s philosophy intravenously and been able to relate it to the whole human condition.

The text is expanded from Helen Edmundson’s single play, performed at the National in 1996. In the hands of Shared Experience, it is ensemble playing at its most inventive, with 15 actors playing 72 parts, including a dog, in one memorable wolf-hunting scene. Even though the story is epic and the canvas vast, the characters engage so directly with the audience that the thread of the narrative is never broken.

It is physical, stylised theatre, startlingly staged and lit. Great gilded picture frames are moved in to serve as windows, doorways, boxes at the opera. The surface of a grand piano provides a rostrum, even a carriage, for a fur-clad flight from Moscow. Fluttering white scarves are a recurrent image, the height of affectation at a society ball, but nightmarish pennants in the frenzy of the battlefield. Bodies are dragged away on white sheets.

Young regimental bloods play drinking games, diners raise knives and forks to tackle invisible food, soldiers die in battle and a woman in childbirth, as the lives of the Russian aristocracy vividly interweave with the build-up to the battle of Austerlitz. The first part leaves you hungry for more.