REVIEW: Natalie Dormer superb in Chichester's overlong Anna Karenina

Artistic director Justin Audibert promised epic theatre on the main-house stage when he took over at the Festival Theatre a couple of years ago. He certainly delivered tonight with this flawed but occasionally brilliant new version of Anna Karenina.

You cannot help but admire the ambition behind the production even if it is an ambition which isn’t fully realised. This is an Anna Karenina which attempts to give us the whole world of Anna Karenina – which is obviously what we get in the book. But surely a theatrical adaptation demands a much narrower, closer focus on so rich, fascinating and complex a heroine.

Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games) is simply superb as Anna. We see her as charismatic and caring when she goes on a mercy mission to rescue her brother’s marriage. We see also her resisting the seductions of Vronsky. She is an adulteress but a reluctant one who finds no happiness as the floodgates of passion open and her world collapses. Dormer is brilliant at conveying the full impact on Anna as she becomes a social pariah, cursed and condemned in public. Adding to her agony is the loss of contact with her children – plus the huge question marks hanging over the new relationship.

All this is beautifully done but it is sometimes lost amid a production which seems far too often far too interested in all the people around her. There are fine performances throughout, especially from Jonnie Broadbent as Stiva, Shalisha James-Davis as Kitty, David Oakes as Levin and Naomi Sheldon as Dolly. Fine work too from Tomiwa Edun as decent, dull, forgiving, grieving, knuckle-cracking Karenin. And certainly the number of people on stage conveys the epic scale of what is happening.

But this is a production which allows itself to run for at least half an hour too long and diminishes its returns in the process – a production which could comfortably cut a number of unnecessary characters. Along the way there are some strange decisions too, especially the death scene which comes with the word death projected above the stage. You wonder why we don’t also get adultery, birth, marriage and despair up in lights. It’s a random and heavy piece of staging.

But the real problem is that this is a production in which too much is allowed to detract from Anna’s story. Of course, the other characters give it context, but too often they effectively drag us away from a character who needs to be so much more central if you want to translate the novel to the stage.

The lingering impression will be Dormer’s outstanding performance. It’s a shame it wasn’t allowed the focus and intensity it deserved. The production has apparently lost 25 minutes since the start of the week. More cutting will improve it considerably.