‘Less Lust, by Less Protein; Meat Fish Bird; Peas Beans; Nuts. And Sitting.’ This sign, once carried by a little man in Oxford Circus, is not dissimilar to Tolstoy’s message in his story The Kreutzer Sonata, which is a strange polemic against male debauchery in the upper classes. Tolstoy warns that the combination of rich diet with sedentariness exacerbates lust, and he excoriates the terrible vicious circle by which upper class females, entrapped and dominated by lustful men, in turn make it their business to lustfully ensnare them. The protagonist – an ‘homme moyen sensuel’ who lives a life of condoned dissoluteness -- marries a young woman when persuaded by her well-tailored, tight-fitting clothes that he is in love with her, but the ‘love’ soon turns into irritation and jealousy, and he ends up killing her when she seems to be having an affair with the violinist who accompanies her piano-playing.
      ‘Such morbid psychology can hardly be of service’, commented a review in 1890; but what in the story appears cranky, idiosynratic and didactic, can, in a stage adaptation, be considered as the inadvertent self-condemnation of the monologuing Pozdynyshev. Nancy Harris’s adaptation is, to my mind, a bit cavalier in its pruning of the Tolstoy original, but it works as a moving portrayal of jealousy, an indictment of what male/female relations have been and can still be, and a proof of the enormous power of music. Behind a screen that sometimes hides, sometimes reveals them, the adulterous wife and her lover (Sophie Scott and Tobias Beer) play parts of the Kreutzer Sonata, and so passionately that you can’t but agree with Pozdynyshev’s outrage at how it could be played ‘in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses’ rather than when actions of sublime significance are to be enacted.
      Still more impressive is the total skilled commitment of actor Hilton McRae, which has a force and concentration that totally grips the audience. McRae’s face is perfect for the part of Pozdynyshev in its blend of sensuality and intelligence. The charming smile of the cultivated man in the railway carriage soon shows up as cruel and sinister, and his poise as the wound-up spring of an embittered obsessive. Yet McRae’s performance elicits sympathy as well as condemnation for his character. Maybe helped by the confined space (the Gate Theatre seats less than 80 people), this production of the Kreutzer Sonata provides an evening of rapt, cathartic passion.
Jane O'Grady