A Month in the Country

A Month in the Country puts a bored, clever woman on a country estate in the middle of a hot summer and introduces her to a young tutor she was not expecting to notice. Natalya is married, admired and has nothing whatever to do. That turns out to be dangerous.

Her husband is decent and oblivious, an old family friend has loved her for years and has never said so, and her seventeen-year-old ward is falling for the same tutor. Nobody declares anything until it is far too late to declare it well. The plot is made almost entirely of people watching one another, deciding not to speak, and then speaking at the worst possible moment.

Ivan Turgenev wrote the play around 1850, though censorship kept it off the stage for years and it did not find its audience until later productions treated it as psychological rather than comic. It is usually credited as the point at which Russian drama stopped being about events and started being about states of mind, and its influence on Chekhov is hard to miss.

The comedy is real but quiet, and the pain sits underneath polite conversation. Everybody behaves reasonably and everybody is damaged by it, and the play refuses to make a villain of either desire or duty. Heat, boredom and proximity do the rest of the work.

It suits audiences who like drama built out of what characters cannot bring themselves to say. It works best live, where the length of a pause tells you considerably more than the line before it.