Review: Burnt by the Sun at the National Theatre, London, UK

(this review written in March 2009, but I forgot to post it so here it comes)

Summary: A reasonably well executed performance, conveying a very important insight. Go see it if:

• You have not seen the movie it is based on
• You prefer everything to be in English,
• Or just strongly prefer the stage before the screen.

However the movie in my mind surpasses it. But with some work it could get closer. Some of Kotov's lines and lines of reasoning are great in the play.

This review contains spoilers.

The play "Burnt by the Sun" is based on the superb film by the same name, by Nikita Michalkov. Peter Flannery has adapted it to the stage. Before the performance I listened to Flannery talking about how he adapted the film.

Not enough shouting and pauses :-)

Act 1 (of 2) suffers from not enough shouting, physical acting and meaningful pauses in conversation.  Emotions need to be acted out stronger whether they are from feelings of (true or feigned) joy, or from anger and malice. In film you get away with small gestures due to the camera's focus, but on stage stronger stuff is needed, especially if you do not use a spotlight. The play starts off unfocused emotionally due to this. Another way to get more focus to act 1 (besides shouting then) would be to cut down on the number of characters on stage. Two or three of the datja's inhabitans could have been cut from the script. Possibly rewriting lines to have more punch. This is all rectified in act 2 where fewer people on stage leads to stronger focus, and the language gets more direct.

The play stays eerily true to the film: Before seeing the play I hadn't realised that every scene and nearly every line of that film is etched in my memory. It was therefore easy to check off lines and plot devices as they came, and suffice to say that Flannery has not touched anything he wasn't forced to due to a different format.

Affability

In the last scene of the play  Rory Kinnear's Mitia comes off a bit too affable and emotionaly worked up, interspersing opera singing with his Russian roulette. Sitting still in a chair, reciting a children's rhyme and squeezing the trigger on numbers in the rhyme would be more consistent with the temperament of the character and his slavic devil-may-care attitude. He comes off as a bit too much of an affable tragic case now, like Jeremy Iron's Sebastian Flyte, or Klaus-Maria Brandauer's Hendrik Höfgen, while it is clear that Mitia knows exactly what game he is playing.  He could probaby still do the opera bit, but jump into some ridiculous pose before each pull to cut to the core of the character.

Kinnear does a good job otherwise in a demanding role and Ciaran Hinds as Kotov grows as the play progresses, but he needs to throw his weight around more in act 1. The actress playing the daughter does a perfectly good job. The play moves on quite swiftly and make it hard to evaluate the other performances in depth.

During the interview with Flannery that I attended I got interested in seing other things he has written. I like his ambition of presenting multiple views at the same time, and what seemed to be a humanistic approach, being mature enough not to cling to some extremist ideology. His work seems to be a quest for knowledge.

Compared to the movie the play more clearly depicts the main conflict as duty-egoism, but also subverts this by showing that also tough man Kotov can break, and just from one sentence. There is also a budding feminist angle present in the play that is missing in the film. Flannery actually lets the wife speak up a  couple of times about what she thinks of the situation. Flannery did mention that in the film the wife acts like a child, and the daughter more as a wife, and that he reversed this for the play, also to get some load off the actress playing the daughter.

One reason I went to see this play, that I stumbled upon due to me meting a friend and mixing up BFI and the National Theatre (the serendipity of being a tourist) and getting last minute tickets, is that I was curious about if it could help me figure out how much of the strength of the movie comes from the technical and artistic performances and how much comes from the drama itself.

When the play ended, I was as gripped of the drama of the story as ever before. And the end of the stage play is the same as in another film of the 90s, La Haine.