Why Anna Karenina is the greatest book ever written - Chichester production

“Other opinions are available! But I think what you have got with Anna Karenina is the birth of the modern novel. I came to Anna Karenina fairly late but you think about the great novels of the 20th century and you can see it all in Anna Karenina. You think of it as being a great work of the 19th century which of course it is but there is an astonishing modernity to the book as Tolstoy wrote it.”

The adaptation which comes to Chichester really began with the success of Phillip’s Crime and Punishment adaptation in Tokyo: “The extent to which it was a hit was quite a surprise and so we were asked to write another one. There was a great Japanese actor that wanted to do a project with me. I began to write it at the end of 2019 and we were supposed to be doing it in Tokyo as part of the Olympic year. But we all know what happened that year.”

It did however reach the Tokyo stage in 2023: “It was done in Japanese. I've only ever seen this in Japanese.

“But we had an enormous hit, even bigger than Crime and Punishment had been – so much so that the Emperor and Empress were struggling to get tickets for the last night. It went really, really well and we were very, very happy with it and it felt like a once in a lifetime thing. But I was talking to my friend (CFT artistic director) Justin (Audibert) and he was telling me about his exciting plans for Chichester which were specifically for epic theatre on the main stage. I thought about this. I always feel like I have done a lot of comedy in this country and that's great but my team and I really wanted to show the work that we've done in Japan over here, work that we are very, very proud of. Justin wanted something really epic and if you want epic, this is epic! So I suggested it.

“I wrote it with my friend Natalie Dormer in mind. It's helpful for a writer to imagine an actor doing it and she is an old friend. She has all the qualities that Anna needed. And she is a great stage actress. You want deep wells of emotion and you want deep, deep humanity and empathy and she has got all that. And since I wrote it she's had children and so much of the story is about Anna being a mother, and Natalie really understands that now.”

As for the process of adaptation: “When you are adapting, I suppose you are looking for a through-line for a play. The fact is that you can do things on stage that you can't do anywhere else. And you can compress the action in lots of interesting ways. You can achieve pages in a book using just a silence or a look on the stage. And it seemed to me that I could condense the book and still capture the spirit of it.

“I think maybe in the 90s people thought about the novel as being about happiness and what it is to be happy but more recently in the face of all the political upheaval and Trump in the White House and climate change and all the horrors that there are in the world, I think that that sense of the book being about happiness has sharpened. It is about what it is to lead a life that is good and moral. After all the upheaval, people are thinking when will it all go back to normal, but it won't and I think this is where Tolstoy was himself as well at the time of writing the book, the sense of an empire teetering on the edge and of everything changing.

“I don't think of myself as a writer who directs or as a director who writes. I think of myself as someone that tries to come up with interesting projects for myself to do. And I always direct them myself the first time.”