Game of Thrones' Natalie Dormer is spellbinding as Anna Karenina

Telegraph

16-06-2025

Natalie Dormer 's ability to combine fire and ice, nestling strong emotions within an impassive demeanour, is glimpsed to spellbinding effect in this period-dressed staging of Tolstoy's 1878 masterpiece Anna Karenina. The Game of Thrones star's transfixing turn as the titular heroine, the wife of a government official who risks everything by falling for the wealthy army officer Vronsky – played in this version, directed and adapted by Phillip Breen, by Seamus Dillane – is reason enough to catch the Russian classic on the Chichester main-stage this summer. But Breen's fleet, bustling approach – turning a heavyweight tome into a near three-hour whirl of incidents – risks upstaging its strong cast; the momentum becomes a distraction in itself.
Tolstoy's epic affords a rich, sweeping view of Russian society on the cusp of modernity, saliently taking in the philosophical and reformist concerns of the landowner Levin (well played here by Dormer's real-life partner David Oakes). Yet on paper and in this production, it's still dominated by the impetuous Anna.
It's ideal casting for Dormer. On screen, she has excelled at women forging their own path in patriarchal societies (Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones). And her Anna is forceful but vulnerable: she drips disdain for her dully respectable husband (Tomiwa Edun's Karenin) but stirs our compassion in making a clandestine visit to the young son she has been forbidden from seeing.
She could triumph as one of Ibsen's heroines – the miserably married Hedda Gabler, or the restive then fugitive Nora in A Doll's House. Breen encourages these Ibsen-oriented thoughts with Max Jones's cluttered design which suggests a child's nursery invaded by perturbing dreams.
Tolstoy's famous opening line – 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' – has made it into the final cut but the script often feels like a galloping resume, with the dialogue inclining towards declaimed soundbites. Naomi Sheldon's Dolly (Anna's unhappy, cheated-on sister-in-law), left aggrieved and exhausted by the demands of child-bearing, even vents a modern explosion of expletives.
The propulsive and cursory approach leaves the novel's profound and wry psychological interiority on the shelf. No sooner has a milieu been created than it's disassembled. Paddy Cunneen's pleasing compositions, performed by three Japanese musicians, add to the kaleidoscope of moods, with wistful waltzes, nagging strings and accordion wheezes. A train-whistle screech becomes a doomy motif too.
Amid the teeming theatricality, Seamus Dillane (son of Stephen, another Game of Thrones alumnus) doesn't get enough chance to smoulder as Anna's seducer Vronsky. Instead of going to bed, the pair chastely paw at each other upright, the jilted Karenin forming part of the tableau.
Elsewhere, amid the ensemble lurks Les Dennis, whose comic skills are harnessed to play a garrulous old servant. At one point he gamely simulates a carriage ride using a rocking-horse. The ostentatious device indirectly sums up an uneven evening that strives to blend accessibility with dashes of avant-gardism. Laudably ambitious, but over-loaded.