PATRICK MARMION: Sexy Sophie fails to rev up this tragic love triangle

Month In The Country (Donmar Warehouse, London)

Verdict: Half-throttle romcom

Rating: Three stars  

Sophie Okonedo is back where she belongs: centre stage. The only trouble is that as an actor, Okonedo is like a Ducati motorbike: built to eat the open road. There's no point keeping her in a garage, just to rev her engine.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what happens in A Month In The Country, a comically claustrophobic play that puts the brakes on her theatrical torque.

Written by the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev in the 1850s, and then updated by the great Irish playwright Brian Friel in 1992, this is the story of the control-freak wife of a wealthy Russian landowner who amuses herself by weaving a labyrinthine love life.

Stuck in a stultifying country backwater, Natalya (Okonedo) falls idly in love with her young son's tutor, Aleksey (Patrick Gibson), while stringing along her husband's best friend Michel (Alistair Petrie).

Meanwhile, her teenage adopted daughter Vera (Rachelle Diedericks) threatens to unravel her schemes – by falling in love with the tutor herself.

Veering between tragedy, comedy and outright farce, the play needs Okonedo to supply a steering personality.

Instead, she seems strangely detached, downplaying her character's sexual charisma. And we know she has that charisma in her tool bag – we saw it, in her lubricious pairing with Ralph Fiennes in the National Theatre's steamy Antony And Cleopatra in 2018.

Yes, she wears a fine collection of pink silk dresses. And yes, she oozes sexual frustration. But we never see her bossing the stage.

Instead, it's the borderline chaos of Lyndsey Turner's production that provides the most pleasure here.

Buff young Irish actor Gibson is one to watch, in every sense: looking genuinely startled by the ladies' interest in him.

And Daniel Rigby has a lot of fun as a country doctor, fond of spouting Christmas cracker gags.

The show looks good, too, on a rectangle of lawn, backed by a smart entrance to a house beyond.

There's an attempt at symbolism in a glass cage that descends to disguise set changes between scenes; it suggests the play's pursuit of love is both a fertile pleasure, and an alluring death trap.

Sadly, Turner's production wobbles uncertainly between both scenarios, ungoverned by a leading woman's controlling hand.

A Small And Quiet Light (Minerva, Chichester)

Verdict: Too small, and too quiet

Rating: Two stars 

Among the many unimaginably brave service personnel in the Second World War recruited to work behind enemy lines was Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan – codename Madeleine – who acted as a radio operator alongside the French resistance. Life expectancy in the role was six weeks.

Yet A Small And Quiet Light, Stephanie Street's warm, theatrical tribute to Khan, is so anxious to be respectful, it makes our heroine seem a little dull.

Khan was born in Moscow in 1914. Her Indian father was a Sufi Muslim musician; her mother a US poet. She wrote children's stories and was a committed pacifist, determined to thwart the Nazis.

Not only does Street under-sell these qualities, she tiptoes around the naivety of Khan's keeping a log of her work (leaving invaluable information for the Nazis).

Once caught, Khan is interrogated by a Gestapo officer who's so polite he's practically British – making tea and pleading: 'I want to help you.' Tragically, she was sent to Dachau and executed.

Priyanga Burford is likeably sincere in Elin Schofield's production, which makes it clear Khan led an exemplary life. But couldn't that life have been rendered with a little more drama?

A Month In The Country runs till October 3; A Small And Quiet Light is on until September 12.